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Heat Crimes follow that Father Dionysios Tabakis smash with Terskol’s debut album of coldly cavernous, crushing and ionzied slabs of Turkish sludge doom, recorded 2017-21 on modular synths and a knackered drum machine and highly advised to acolytes of Godflesh, Sunn O))), Joachim Nordwall, Muslimgauze, Kevin Richard Martin. Joining the label’s necklace of sore thumbs, the eponymous entry from Utku Önal aka Terskol exists at a crossroads of styles combined in ways that surely recalls the number of greats mentioned above, but also with an uncanny concision and metallic resonance that leaves ice burns to the touch. Not really rock, nor fully electronic; it’s best conceived as a sort of primordial cyborganic force of nature certain to find its audience lurking in the shadows of convention. Arguably; it’s the heaviest release in the label’s half decade run thus far; 11 uncompromising payloads of glacially-paced lurch defined with shivered machine drums and radioactive reverb, prone to keen from doomscapes evoking a fantasy Stephen O’Malley x Bryn Jones hookup, to bouts of horror score vamps and barbed distortion, into passages of burned-out bliss thru to sky-razing, warmonger riffs. As with the likes of Avenir’s ‘90s electronica on the label before them, Terskol’s formerly unreleased musick is effectively new to the world at large and feels like a missing link on the timeline, nailing a combo of styles with a cloistered vision that leaves the impression it was never really intended for wider consumption. After marinading in the archive for so long it’s all clearly ripe for ritual cleansing, pulling heads wholly into unheimlich zones of seething amp worship on ‘WMEMWAMS’, and setting fire to the air in the ambient sludge of ‘9A’, hackling like theeee nastiest Godflesh in ‘Backstepper’, and with a prescient title ‘Bedroht’ to sure to snag Gen-Z doomscrollers.
Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He serves at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, the Nativity of the Theotokos, and records alone, at home. The music made in that house does not announce itself. It arrives from somewhere older than genre, older than the distinctions we use to organize sound. Tabakis is a musician of the Eastern Mediterranean in the fullest sense: formed in Byzantine theory and practice, fluent on qanun, oud, cümbüş, ney, zurna, Politiki and Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, yali tanbur. The system he works within is Byzantine, not as aesthetic choice or cultural reference, but as logic. The scales, the intervals, the way a note moves toward or away from another: this is the operating system. What emerges is slow, heavy, meditative, drone that carries the mass of stone walls and sustained prayer. It is still Byzantine music. Two tracks are built around the fretless electric guitar, perdesiz in Turkish, meaning simply: without frets. The fretless instrument is one of the few capable of producing moria, intervals smaller than a semitone, with the exactness the voice has and fixed-pitch instruments do not. Here the guitar does not behave like a guitar. It bends into pitches that Western tuning sealed off centuries ago, moving the way Earth moves in their slowest passages, or the way Scott Walker's later work used sound as weight rather than melody. On two tracks, Evgenia Symela Armeni sings. Her voice is psaltic, trained in the Orthodox chanting tradition, ψαλτοτράγουδο, chant-song, and it cuts through the drone the way a single candle cuts through a dark nave. Χαίρε Παρθένε Σουμελά, a Pontian hymn to the Theotokos of Soumela. Ρόδον Ψυχής, Rose of the Soul. Both devotional. Both immovable. Tabakis is also a writer. His books, among them Into the Abyss with a View of Paradise and The Mad Forerunner, move between Athonite monastic thought and the texture of contemporary life. The music moves the same way. Alienation, depression, isolation, not named as modern problems but as ancient conditions, long described, still present. The stillness of Athos and the noise of the present sit in the same frame, unresolved. Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is of Asia Minor descent, 53, married with three children. This is his first release.
Barely known outside of his home country during his lifetime, the late Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura has seen his global stature rise steadily in the past few years. The 2017 reissue of his lauded debut, Music For Nine Post Cards, along with a slow building cult internet following has helped ignite a renaissance in his acclaimed body of work, much of which has never been released outside of Japan. Known for his sound design and environmental music, Yoshimura worked on a number of commissions following the 1982 release of Music For Nine Post Cards, including works for museums, galleries, public spaces, TV shows, video art, fashion shows, and even a cosmetics company. Originally released in 1986, GREEN is one of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s most well-loved recordings and a favorite of the artist himself. Recorded over the winter of 1985-86 at Yoshimura’s home studio, the compositions unfold at an unhurried pace, a stark contrast to the busy city life of Tokyo. As Yoshimura explained in the original liner notes, the album title in the context of this body of work is not meant to be seen as a color, but is rather used to convey “the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN”—which perfectly encapsulates the soothing and warm sounds contained on the album, although it was created utilizing Yamaha FM synthesizers, known for their crisp digital tones. This edition marks the first reissue of the highly sought-after and impossible to find album. It features the original mix preferred by Yoshimura himself, previously available only on the initial Japanese vinyl release (a limited edition remixed version of the album, with added sound effects, was released on CD in the US). Additionally, this release is the first in our ongoing series, WATER COPY, focusing on the works of Hiroshi Yoshimura.
The 1993 split point between pop punk and emo is no better illustrated than by Garden Variety's self-titled debut. While Billy and Bivouac flirted with the mainstream, this Long Island trio proposed at the post-hardcore prom. Muscular octave guitar chug with a side of late night zine work at the local diner. Backbeat heartbreak, hold the FX. Thank Charles Maggio for your favorite record next time you see him at the Paramus mall.
The 1993 split point between pop punk and emo is no better illustrated than by Garden Variety's self-titled debut. While Billy and Bivouac flirted with the mainstream, this Long Island trio proposed at the post-hardcore prom. Muscular octave guitar chug with a side of late night zine work at the local diner. Backbeat heartbreak, hold the FX. Thank Charles Maggio for your favorite record next time you see him at the Paramus mall.
Brussels-based producer, composer, and field recordist Le Motel has developed a distinct body of work rooted in environmental sound, collage, and immersive electronic composition. Across releases, collaborations, and audiovisual projects, his music blends ambient textures, rhythmic experimentation, field recordings, and downtempo electronics into transportive listening experiences. Le Motel is also the founder of the Brussels label Maloca Records and has become known for projects that incorporate recordings gathered through travel and collaboration. His acclaimed release Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ drew from recordings made in Vietnam and explored the intersection of ambient composition, documentary sound, and experimental electronic music. Pozo de Agua continues Le Motel’s exploration of atmosphere, texture, and place through a fluid palette of ambient electronics, organic detail, and layered sonic environments. Most of the tracks were created outdoors or in transit, primarily on trains, emerging from what Le Motel describes as “a very natural and emotional process” of translating feelings, memories, and passing thoughts into sound. The album treats environmental sounds — ripples, water drops, movement, and air — with the same importance as traditional instruments, allowing elements to drift in and out like ocean waves while forming subtle polyrhythms and overlapping textures. Working at the intersection of ambient, experimental electronic music, balearic downtempo, and new age-inspired sound design, Le Motel creates music that feels both intimate and expansive. His approach combines processed acoustic elements, environmental recordings, and soft electronic structures into compositions that reward deep listening while maintaining an understated emotional pull. For listeners drawn to exploratory ambient music, environmental sound collage, and contemporary downtempo electronics, Pozo de Agua presents another entry in Le Motel’s evolving sonic world.
Wondrously uninhibited, and liberated from the added pressure of either a studio or a planned live recording, there is true magic, sparkling energy, and no lowering of intensity in this never-before-released unearthed gem. The night before Ella Fitzgerald walked into Konserthuset in Stockholm and recorded what became The Stockholm Concert, 1966, the Pablo Records live album now considered among the essential documents of her late career, she played two concerts at Falkoner Theatre in Copenhagen. Like many other Black American jazz musicians of her era, Denmark felt like home to Ella. It was a country where Black American jazz musicians found a degree of respect that the United States too often denied them. Ella's ease in her adopted home was palpable when she walked onto the Falkoner Theatre stage that Sunday. And, now the results are released on record for the first time, and with the full blessing of Ella’s estate, we are treated to an irrepressible, unexpectedly vital addition to her canon Track two has been attributed on the CD and LP per the tape box and the Danish radio printer Borge Roger Henrichsen’s introduction at the time, who erroneously announced the track as Hey Little Girl (Otis Blackwell, Booby Stevenson). In fact is is Wives and Lovers (Burt Bacharach, Hal David). We decided to keep the reference as a historical record of the original recording though subsequent issues will be corrected.
Joe Gibbs reggae dub series "African Dub Chapter". this chapter 5 was originally released in 1984.
Previously released on Low Company in 2023, Purely Physical Teeny Tapes reissue the full album from Tarquin Manek, one of the most prolific, distinct and perhaps under-recognised producers in our orbit. If bezonked, subaquatic dub-pop zoners are your thing, anything from The Skaters to Swell Maps, YL Hooi to Carla dal Forno, CS + Kreme to Jac Berrocal, this one’s for you. The 16th and final number from short-lived yet beloved London shop-turned-label Low Company renders a raft of works made by Tarquin Manek (F Ingers, Kallista Kult, Tarcar) 2013-2020, and shafted in the release schedule until now. Nine songs depict Tarquin in his soggiest songwriting mode, floating over rugged, groggy loops in a rare, non-collaborative form. It’s a captivating self-portrait of an artist who is perhaps best known for his collaborations and work behind the scenes, variously fostering talents from the Naarm (Melbourne) undergrowth such as YL Hooi and Carla dal Forno, the latter of whom was his bandmate in F Ingers alongside Sam Karmel of CS + Kreme, and many of whom would grace Low Company and its cult predecessor Blackest Ever Black. A sense of desiccated bliss riddles the bittersweet fantasy tang of ‘Breathing Under Honey’, where Manek sets a course from the bleached coral underfoot on ‘Stones on the Beach’, to a lizard-hipped bossa shuffle on ‘Mirage Game’, via superb bouts of Count Ossie-meets-Spencer Clark whims on ’Submerging Emergency’, thru Hassellian trumpet gargling in the sink on ‘Sea Slug Bender’, to instrumental cyberpunk sea shanty, ‘Age Old Squall’, or coming across Lewis on a jolly with drunken sailors at a late night Berlin bar on ‘Basic Trouble’. Of course it all hits that crinkled sweetspot for levels of eyes-half-shut perpendicular pop that we’ve come to expect from Low Company and their constellation of affiliates, joining dots between the ahead-of-their-time ‘80s post punk tape oddities that surface on Efficient Space, A Colourful Storm’s febrile dream sequences, to rickety DIY bops from the London mulch. Laters, Low Company - a proper bunch of sound cnuts.
Klara Lewis' Opening is a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers. "Klara Lewis’ distinctive talent for disfiguring sound into forms that remain recognisably song-like reaches a new peak here. Lewis, creator of worlds, treats music as a mirror that reflects a perspective misaligned with the real image. Her music moves in unusual and often startling ways. Acoustic instruments such as ukulele and piano are subjected to processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, their original forms continually reshaped. The tracks within Opening offer an array of disorientating tactics; damaged field recordings are suddenly sliced into ominous rhythmical patterns whilst deceptively simple tactics provide foreboding dread. Often alien on entry, the progression of a piece can land in a surprising tenderness, or the other way around. The momentum grows as a physical state but also one which is questioning, desiring, encapsulating a feeling, to explore a further way of expression and ultimately connecting: A new closeness, a new perspective. Opening is an album in which the protagonist’s manipulation of sonic matter seems to extend beyond the music itself, resulting in a corresponding manipulation of the active listener. Sounds shift, dissolve, and re-emerge in altered forms, creating an experience that feels both intimate and disorienting. Lewis maintains a delicate balance between abstraction and emotional immediacy, drawing the listener into a world where familiar musical gestures are constantly reconfigured in surprising ways. The works on Opening are refracted through an exploratory and transformative lens, suggesting an artist continuing to redefine the possibilities of musical language as a space where the instantaneous and the eternal come together."
Greek harpist and composer Sissi Rada interprets the music of Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms with unfathomable levels of detail and charm, resulting in one of the most gorgeously executed records of the year. Trust - it’s fully essential listening FFO Joanna Newsom, Svitlana Nianio, Kate Bush, Delphine Dora, Nikos Mamangakis… Sissi Makropoulou has been pinging our radar for a while now, but especially hard since 2024's Stroom-released 'Aporia' and that dazzling ‘Demeter In Aexone’ album that properly locked us in to her brand of uncanny avant dream-folk, a highly distinctive signature sound she developed even further on the fantastic 'Nana Butu' earlier this year. She’s a serial collaborator - with Lena Platonos, Brian Eno, Christina Vantzou, Jay Glass Dubs - even Lee "Scratch" Perry - all the while composing chamber music on the side. And It's that latter practice that comes to the fore on ‘Serious Songs’ singing in German while attacking Wagner's chilly 'Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme' (Five Poems for a Female Voice) on the A side, and Brahms' pious 'Vier ernste Gesänge' (Four Serious Songs) on the flip. As you'd expect, it isn't just a simple recital; with harp and voice the focal points, packed out with winding, nebulous arrangements and perspicacious references to avant-garde musical history, integrating dissonant orchestral elements, prepared piano, opera, classical guitar, environmental sounds and foreboding oscillations - with an exquisite ear for detail. Oddly for music this tranquil, it benefits from increased volume - at least a level where you can marvel at the array of tiny, unusual production flourishes. And it's a suite that grows and grows. On 'Wesendonck 1’, she opens with voice and harp recalling Joanna Newsom's folk-inspired song cycle 'Ys'. But as the piece develops, she begins to slowly show her hand, introducing harmonic, hypnotic effects to blur the edges. The result is discombobulating in the best way, sounding as dreamy as Julee Cruise's 'Floating into the Night' while somehow still remaining true to the source material. The drama continues to build on 'Wesendonck 2', her delivery of the words - written by poet Mathilde Wesendonck who Wagner was famously besotted with - fittingly dramatic, assisted by brass and grinding drums broken occasionally by moments of ineffable beauty. On 'Wesendonck 4', Makropoulou augments the production with metallophone chimes, fixing sequences with growling synths and heavily processed cries. Sissi plays a remarkable sleight of hand on the flip. Beginning conservatively, she introduces Brahms' cycle of Lutheran biblical readings with a celestial harp and a gently experimental vocal, pitch shifted to a screwed conclusion. On 'Brahms 2', her performance is kinked by disorienting concrète-style operatic spools that pull us into another musical timeline entirely. She is so confident with her subject matter - whether it's the classical canon, folk, electronic or neue musik - that it all sounds like a natural extension of her practice, converging into something that fully defies categorisation. Anyway, words don’t really do it for this one. Just give it a spin and you’ll soon melt into it, one of the most quietly startling albums released this year.
Keith Freund’s music occupies a space where careful musicianship and homebrewed experimentation meet and shake hands. On “Window Left Open,” spacious melodies drift through dense fields of electronic activity: saxophone lines rise above buzzing circuitry, percussion flickers at the edges of the frame, and clustered glitch textures dart through the music like insects in tall summer grass. Every sound feels vividly animated, a charged part of the same mercurial ecosystem. Freund’s talent lies in balancing warmth and unpredictability with remarkable ease. Patient motifs recall the exploratory spirit of early folktronica, while bit-reduced textures, degraded loops, and idiosyncratic synthesis techniques continually reshape the terrain beneath them. Rather than treating acoustic and electronic elements as opposing forces, Freund allows them to intermingle until distinctions dissolve, creating compositions that reward close listening while retaining immediate warmth. This record finds Freund working with a fully formed vocabulary that is truly his own, transforming glitch, melody, improvisation, and atmosphere into songs that are both fundamentally curious and disarmingly engaging.
First vinyl reissue of the 1979 holy grail private press debut by Californian vibes and marimba player Rickey Kelly, leading a classy ensemble from Latinate, subtropical jazz to Afro-rooted spiritual styles and blissed cool. ""Rickey, I know these are your friends, the guys you went to school with, but if you wanna record an album, you record with musicians who have been playing their whole life; whatever you write, they'll put their whole life into it. You play with your friends; they may not even play in tune." These are the words of Slave guitarist Kevin Johnson, and they were to change the course of young Rickey Kelly's life. It was 1978, and music student Kelly had approached Johnson with a tape of rough demos of some songs he'd written. A San Francisco native, Kelly had recently moved the short distance south to study music at LA City College in East Hollywood. He was a member of E.W. Wainwright Jr.'s African Roots of Jazz, and was spending up to 10 hours a day in practice on both vibes and marimba. He also played with Horace Tapscott, and had his own band made up of fellow students, but it was his ambition to make an album that led to the conversation with Johnson. It was a turning point in his education, and a decision was looming. The next thing Johnson said was "You call the best jazz musicians. How'd you like to play with Billy Higgins?", a line that would seal it for anyone; for a youngster like Rickey just starting out in the business, you just don't turn down the opportunity to play with the likes of highly accomplished musicians, especially those of the calibre of legendary jazz drummer Billy Higgins. Some calls were made and the date was set to record at Studio Masters on Beverly Blvd, a studio set up just a few years previous in 1973, owned and operated by Dot Records founder Randy Wood with his son John. Some of the other music professionals set to record with Kelley that day were flautist Adele Sebastian, bass player Tony Dumas, saxophonist Charles Owens and vocalist Diane Reeves, none of whom had previously played with Kelly before. Kelly was impressed with the studio, with the gold records displayed on the walls and the famous musicians hanging out. 'It took a lot of humility for me to record with them, I mean I was nobody, nothing, and for not a lot of money either' remembers Rickey in a later interview with Calvin Lincoln, 'It taught me a lot, to practice hard, and study for the rest of your life, to give your all, and there's a lot of all to give'. As the recording session took place, John Wood was listening in. He was impressed. Kelly didn't have the funds to manufacture and release the album himself, so Wood suggested it was pressed up on his in-house studio label, Los Angeles Phonograph Records, and thus the LP 'My Kind of Music' was released early in 1979. The album also saw a subsequent pressing soon afterwards on Dennis Sullivan's New Note label. Kelly remains humble and proud of his debut album to this day. 'I was still a beginner' he says, 'These masters walked in, smiling, and gave me something worth gold'."
Still somehow operating in the shadows despite a pair of exceptional albums under his belt, plus a standout appearance on Space Afrika’s acclaimed ‘Honest Labour’ album, Nigerian born Londoner LA Timpa returns with this super deep, confounding third album featuring screwed, unfathomable dreampop variants that worm from layered flutes to oddly tuned trip hop, referencing everything from Mica Levi to Klein to early Yves Tumor and, most obviously, A.R Kane - ultimately sounding like nothing else. LA Timpa snagged our attention with his exceptional debut ‘Equal Amounts Afraid’ for O___o?, and an acclaimed follow-up for Rabit’s Halcyon Veil, which eventually led to a guest spot on Space Afrika’s cult lightning rod ‘Honest Labour’ and a remix for Tricky. After letting the dust settle, he returns with a new collection of songs mired in rawly sublime melancholy, turning existential reflections into a richly evocative sort of chamber pop akin to Arthur Russell jamming with A.R. Kane. It drifts heavy-lidded between fully formed songs obfuscated by a dense fug to properly bezzonked lo-fi improv that follows his nose for detuned strings smudged and activated with field recordings. It’s all done in the loosest, most hypnagogic style, characterising how the spirits of ‘80s no wave NYC and even ‘90s Kiwi indie rock have sluiced into the truly singular milieu of South London in the 2020s. Sung in a fragile yet shatterproof falsetto to backdrops of smeared loops and lines of coruscating guitar and keys, ‘Pity By One All Good Treasure’ conveys itself by seduction and suggestion rather than any heavy handed or literal techniques. Whether by design or implication, its rhythmelodic make-up recalls how West African music surfaces in the lilt of Lifetones, or even how Jim Reeves’ country music unexpectedly percolates thru Nigerian styles, all obviously at a remove of decades, but nonetheless short-circuiting expectations and putative timelines in the process. The record wails into view with 'Wide', a properly bewildering opening of tangled flutes that sounds like Debit’s pre-historic wind instrument investigations as if treated by Alvin Lucier, before taking flight on a screwy trajectory that seems to reference a great deal of music we love; from labelmate Dawuna to Coby Sey’s pop inversions to Dean Blunt’s enigmatic world-building, from Tricky’s low-lit pre-millennial tension to Mica Levi’s unsteady phased strings - it all sounds immaculately produced and entirely unresolved. In fact, the glossolalic unintelligibility of the songs becomes a virtue it its own right, initially limning and drawing us into psychoacoustic parameters and occupying an elusive mid-distance throughout the album, form the slippery lilt of ‘It Smiles Without my Lie’ to the Blood Orange-esque nod of ‘City Hell Cast In Fire’, the haunted blooziness of ‘Treatment’ and eyes-in-backa-head grog to ‘Brave (forsake)’, and a properly wooze-inducing enigma on the nine minute denouement ‘Ruthless’ - a crumbling epic that centres negative space, splicing field recordings with instrumental strums. When a song does eventually appear from those embers, it's like a queered response to Grouper's enduring 'Heavy Water’ as though perceived through layer upon layer of gauzy saturation. It all makes for a supremely unusual and engrossing listen, and provides further proof, if needed, that LA Timpa is an elemental force all of their own, a vital part of South London’s eminently watchable new musical ecology.
Pity by One All Good Treasure LA Timpa
Fresh from an appearance on Space Afrika’s 'Honest Labour’ album, collaborations with Klein and Lol K and a placement in the Dazed 100 list, LA Timpa finally offers his head-turning 'Equal Amounts Afraid' album on vinyl following a short CD run just before the pandemic hit in early 2020. Served up on promising yung London label O___o, and made with additional mixing from Solange collaborator Kwes and mastering from sometime Dean Blunt engineer Amir Shoat, ‘Equal Amounts Afraid’ is a beautiful smudge of pop experimentation riddled with timeless musical soul. Following from his 2016 debut ‘Animal’, and guest production for Cold Specks’ trip hop sound, LA Timpa’s gently reserved and melancholic productions push an intimate pop vocabulary into spectral, dreamlike dimensions. Introspective and avant like Klein’s psyched chop-ups, as sensuous as Blood Orange, but with a taste for expressively harmonised pop refrains that clearly recall Yves Tumor via Richard Youngs, the album unfolds with its own logic, deploying eyelid-tugging levels of hypnagogic charm that practically demand to be heard in sequestered, lowlit situations. Seducing us to his singular temporality and hazy atmosphere with the vaporous falsetto and ambient soundfield of sirens and groggy bass in ‘Around’, a cut-up interlude leads into fragmented music box melody and intimate plainsong on ‘Fertile’, while ‘Core’ almost echoes the 4AD dream-pop of A.R. Kane, and ‘Give’ beautifully dematerialises indie-pop into ambient gauze. ‘Backyard Exotic’ surfaces his strangest side in a maze of mushied songcraft, ushering a trippier 2nd half where the songs really start to fray between ‘Caretaker’, the smokers’ hymnal vignette ‘Towel Under The Door’, before channelling Thom Yorke in the melting Mbira melody of ‘Rattle Snake’, and spooling out into proper ambient soul with the spine-tracing lines of ‘Tried Ice’ and the smudged magic of ‘Memory Phone’ where he truly divines a strength in his vulnerability in a way that should resonate with the most sensitive souls.
Nueen follows production for Iceboy Violet and a string of releases for Quiet Time Tapes, Good Morning Tapes and Balmat, with a sprawling new album for 3XL, an ambient drill epic featuring guest spots from Dawuna, Space Afrika, Loraine James, Xzavier Stone and RenzNiro. Everything clicked into place for Nacho Pezzati when he turned the humid soundscapes of his early releases into distorted beds for Iceboy Violet's casual free associations on the Hyperdub-released ‘You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through the Fire' back in 2024. He retains the same energy on 'Swerved', working alongside a team of vocalists and collaborators to locate a sweetspot between rap, dub and ambient vistas. His methodology is laid bare on 'Searchtiers', obscuring its UK drill-style sliding bass with weightless synths and gaseous FX, upping the ante when vocalist and producer Xzavier Stone jumps on the mic on 'Nowhere Near A Section'. The addition of proper hooks, adlibs and rhymes - "let it burn like Usher Raymond" - makes the production hit that much harder, not just referencing radio rap and R&B but challenging the paradigm. Fittingly, Loraine James, who early on inhabited similar zones, lends her voice to the grimy 'Atmosphere is my Style', whispering over Pezzati's hair metal samples and booming 808 Mafia-style basses. Manny's own RenzNiro checks in on 'Impls', rhyming over one of Nueen's most decisive beats, all clipped snares, gong samples and tweaked bass. And Space Afrika turn up with an assist on the low-slung highlight 'Shm', a smoove and sensual D'Angelo-style soul banger with none other than Dawuna on the mic. Dawuna returns on 'Matrix', splitting duties with Xzavier Stone who provides an impressive '00s post-jiggy hook and Pezzati's vision materialises. The haze of half-remembered bites of cloud rap, pop and club rap represents a post-P2P hauntology that's global, not really localised. And connecting with Space Africa again on the closing track 'I Guess', he travels beyond the boundaries of the album itself, lavishing SA's orchestral cries with fuzzy synths and swirling vocals.
Smouldering and aching in all the right places, Dawuna's latest mixtape is a muted hypnagogic R&B tour de force, pieced together while recovering from a traumatic head injury and conveying all the fragile, dizzy and ineffable beauty imaginable. Trust, it’s next-level gear tipped FFO D’Angelo, Prince, Niecy Blues, Soulquarians, Rodney Jerkins. ‘African Family Laptop Musick’ is Ian Mugerwa’s 4th dispatch as Dawuna since 2020’s still unfathomable ‘Glass Lit Dream’, an album that we called "the debut of the century thus far" and which has still, somehow, evaded any kind of meaningful crossover despite triggering total joy and bewilderment every single time we play it to the uninitiated. Since that album, and shortly after a relocation to Baltimore, Mugerwa was involved in a car accident that triggered a period of hospitalisation and amnesia. 'African Family Laptop Music' emerges from that difficult period; recorded and pieced together while still in recovery. He doesn't remember much about the project at this point, just small flashes, but it's easily the most personal, touching material he's shared to date. Mugerwa calls the compositions simple, but it’s the kind of simple many have spent a lifetime trying to engineer. On opener 'I am a woman too', daring lo-fi sound design lends texture to multi-tracked vocal harmonies and a beat rapped on a table with knuckles and finger clicks, before tuning in to a chat between elders on ‘Obulesi’, that he laments in the bloozy ache of the incredible ‘Family Trauma Drama’. Lashed to a celestial vocal performance, he fleshes out the arrangement with downsampled waltzing hats and a single snare hit with synths that sound like they've been lifted from a mid-'80s Sierra adventure game, before being filtered out to a low hum. There's a quiet virtuosity on show; it's lo-fi, with all the aesthetic hallmarks of some of the very best outsider gear, but Mugerwa builds on the foundations of 'Glass Lit Dream' and 'Naya' to provide an unmistakably Black ideation of hauntology. Approaching the very concept of memory from a unique vantage point, he muddles dreams and impressions, sorting through the canon (think 'Songs in the Key of Life', 'Sign O' the Times', 'Baduizm', 'Brown Sugar' and 'Full Moon' just for starters) as it vanishes from view. What makes the record hit even harder is that Mugerwa collages the more “proper” songs with skits and interludes that help map the narrative, taping conversations with his family and abstracting them with disorientating glitches, synths and FX. ‘Pressure’ pushes deep on a bittersweet bruise with lyrics about “the pain on your brain making fun of you”, set to the heaviest smudge of bass and organ recalling Angel Bat Dawid’s ‘The Oracle’, whilst the latter stages reveal precious gems in the harpsichord sway of ‘Bipolar Memory’,thru the lip-biting downswang and helium-voiced Camille vibes of ‘Grabba Boy Problem’ and a poignant sign-off addressed to his father - not sure if that’s his dad or him upstairs - in a delicate prayer ‘Undo This Damage,’ which once over, is bound to make you rake back over all Dawuna’s gear to date. "This is the last lil offering from a personal side of myself before I give y'all something big," he assures cryptically. "Enjoy." Incredible, really.
Michael J. Blood executes a stunning volte-face from rugged house and soul to more intuitive, introspective, world-building ambient jazz and electroacoustic dub realms under a new moniker SEES, signifying a newfound psychoactive frisson to his work that lands him somewhere in the spiritual vicinity of Vangelis, Moodymann, Ron Trent, Pendant, Terre Thaemlitz. ‘Ampersand Curve’ initiates a brilliant new phase of work by North Manchester’s most elusive artist, best known as Michael J. Blood. His string of ruffkut club bangers as well as jams with Rat Heart & Samizdat over the past seven years, have made his records a true cult property, and now find him signed to one of the UK’s most foundational techno imprints - more of which later this year. But under the SEES aegis, he swims in very different waters, following his instincts to use the studio-as-instrument to produce his most impressive, deep-minded work, made from - and for - the heart. Where MJB was all about off-the-cuff club jams cooked for immediacy, his new stylistic switch reveals myriad worlds of influence swirling under the hood, where interrelated spheres of spiritual jazz, dub, ambient and concrète more clearly light up his rich inner world. As the story goes, MJB was burgled a few years back, and lost most of his studio just as the project was hitting its stride. It prompted a personal review of his practice, re-learning new kit, allowing him to bend the rules. Adopting a sort of first thought, best thought approach to composition, the new methodology fuelled a renewed imagination in flux, or what he identifies as SEES: a personalised way of conveying complex emotions. That un-doing of musical and mental conditioning opens the walls of his music to vast new horizons. Opener ‘Ithaca’ fathoms sonorous midnight jazz with 10 mins of a plangent, searching sax solo in HD widescreen, like some alternate version to the Blade Runner Love Theme, while a resonant vocoder soliloquy ‘Unseem’ reaches into space harmonised between Alvin Lucier and Ron Trent, and ‘Sheer’ chases the devil out of labyrinthine dub dimensions. The floating dream architecture of ‘Caprices’ caps the LP’s underlying narrative and painterly qualities with a romantic conclusion of blushing pads and shivered, metallic echoes of the subtropical that suggest a coming-to-terms with worries, refreshed and good to go again. A huge, heartfelt tip for a 2026 stunner.
Often credited as the father of multi-media theatre, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) took complete creative control over his productions - including cutting-edge approaches to lighting and costume that transformed human bodies into shifting sculptural shapes, while also composing wildly innovative electronic music as accompaniment. After initially experimenting with musique concrète and tape manipulation (as demonstrated on the 1959 LP Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais) Nikolais became the first owner of Robert Moog's synthesizer at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York in late 1964. Relying heavily on the Moog and later the Synclavier synth/sampler, these 21 tracks document Nikolais' highly-prescient compositions across the mid 1960s through to the late 1980s - existing not only as extensions of his other-worldly choreographic pieces, but standalone pieces of foundational mid-century American electronic and experimental music.
細野晴臣率いるティン・パン・アレーが、1976年5月8日、横浜・中華街の老舗中華菜館「同發新館」で行った伝説的なライブ。その夜の空気を克明に記録した音源が、半世紀の時を経て“ステレオ・ミックス”として蘇る。
今回のリリースでは、新たに発見されたステレオマスターをもとに、エンジニアの保土田剛による新たなミックス／マスタリングを実施。当時の会場の空気感、臨場感を感じる素晴らしいMIXを是非アナログでお楽しみください。50年という時間を超えてなお輝き続ける一夜のライブ音源が遂にLP化！
[Credits]
細野晴臣 Vocal, Marimba, Hand Clap
鈴木茂 E.Guitar, Banjo
林立夫 Drums
浜口茂外也 Percussions, Flute, Hand Clap
矢野顕子 Piano, Chorus
坂本龍一 E.Piano, Synthesizer
田中章弘 E.Bass, Hand Clap
羽鳥幸次 Trumpet, Hand Clap
新井英治 Trombone, Hand Clap
村岡健 Sax, Hand Clap
Mix, Mastering : Goh Hotoda
Cutting Engineer : Shinya Matsushita (PICCOLO AUDIO WORKS)
Art Direction & Design : Takashi Okada
Illustration : Takashi Okada, Yasuo Yagi
Photographs : Masashi Kuwamoto
Liner Notes : Yoshiro Nagato
【収録内容】
SIDE-A
1. つめたく冷して
(Words & Music : Otis Blackwell, Elvis Presley Japanese Words : Morio Agata)
2. 香港Blues
(Words & Music : Hoagy Carmichael)
3. 絹街道
(Words & Music : Haruomi Hosono)
4. チャタヌガ・チュー・チュー
(Words : Mack Gordon Music : Harry Warren Japanese Words : Haruomi Hosono)
5. ボレロ（メンバー紹介）
(Music : Maurice Ravel)
6. ハリケーン・ドロシー
(Words & Music : Haruomi Hosono)
7. ブラック・ピーナッツ
(Words & Music : Haruomi Hosono)
8. トーク・トゥ・ミー
(Words & Music : Irving Fields, Sunny Skylar)
SIDE-B
1. 北京Duck
(Words & Music : Haruomi Hosono)
2. 蝶々-San
(Words & Music : Haruomi Hosono)
3. アヤのバラード
(Music : Haruomi Hosono)
4. 熱帯夜
(Words & Music : Haruomi Hosono)
5. ファイアークラッカー
(Music : Martin Denny)
6. “サヨナラ” ザ・ジャパニーズ・フェアウェル・ソング
(Words : Freddy Morgan Music : Hasegawa Yoshida)
Andrew Chalk has spent more than 40 years crafting quietly influential ambient and experimental music, from the industrial edges of his early work to the delicate guitar, keyboard and collage pieces of recent years. Mystical Obscurant captures the breadth of that journey in a concise collection of new recordings. Gentle guitar meditations, hazy piano sketches, environmental sounds and subtle loops all feature, revealing a musical language built on patience, atmosphere and suggestion. Despite drawing on different phases of his career, every piece shares the same understated beauty, inviting listeners into slow-moving, deeply absorbing soundscapes.
