NEW ARRIVALS
1112 products
In March 2025, after 7 years as a live band, Ghost Funk Orchestra finally made their first overseas voyage to tour Europe and the UK. 'Live In Europe' is a document that showcases the eight-piece touring band at the height of its powers. The track list was constructed from two consecutive sold out shows, the first at Jassmine in Warsaw and the second at Paradiso in Amsterdam. It leans heavily on songs from 'An Ode To Escapism' and 'A New Kind Of Love,' while also including a few tracks from 'A Trip To The Moon,' a nod to the early GFO days with the song “Evil Minds,” and even a few brand new tunes. Both shows were professionally recorded, with Amsterdam’s recording being handled by the Abbey Road Institute. Please enjoy this RSD 2026 exclusive album!
The source material for 'Layering Buddha' are samples derived from a 'Buddha Machine' - an audio artwork by the Chinese/Canadian artist duo FM3. These are cigarette package sized, battery powered sound playback devices, containing nine short musical loops. Due to manufacturing imperfections, individual machines play those with a slightly different sound, pitch and duration. The built-in playback circuit, with its low sampling rate and bit resolution, produces a very rough sound, similar to ancient computer games or talking toys. Rich textures and moving echoes occur when many of these machines are played at the same time, distributed in space.
On Repetitive Music vol. 1, Misha Panfilov strips things back to synth and piano, threading slow‑turning patterns and hushed harmonies through Tallinn and its outskirts like illuminated loops traced in winter air. Recorded between 2020 and 2021 in Tallinn, Vaskjala and Vääna‑Jõesuu, Repetitive Music vol. 1 presents Misha Panfilov working at his most distilled, circling a small set of ideas until they glow. The title is both a statement of method and a gentle misdirection. These pieces are built on repetition, but not the mechanical, grid‑locked kind; they move like breathing or walking, with small irregularities and shifts that keep the patterns alive. Synthesizers and piano are the only protagonists, yet the music feels quietly orchestral in its emotional range, expanding and contracting around a few carefully chosen motifs. Across the collection, Panfilov treats repetition as a way of listening more closely rather than of zoning out. Short figures on piano or synth are set spinning, then nudged, reharmonised or slightly offset rhythmically, so that over time they seem to change colour without ever quite abandoning their original shape. The electronic timbres tend toward the warm and tactile - rounded oscillators, softly pulsing basses, grainy delays - while the piano provides a grounded, human touch: hammers, pedal noise, the faint resonance of the rooms in which the recordings took place. The combination creates a sense of intimacy, as if each piece were being assembled in real time just a few feet away. The locations matter. Tallinn’s urban stillness, the quieter outskirts of Vaskjala, the coastal air of Vääna‑Jõesuu all inflect the pacing and atmosphere. Some tracks feel like interior meditations, close‑mic’d and introspective, while others carry a wider sense of space, as if written with a distant horizon in mind. Yet the through‑line is consistency of tone: a calm, inquisitive mood that never lapses into sentimentality or pure ambient drift. Panfilov’s background in groove‑oriented and cinematic music is present here only in trace form - a sensitivity to contour, an instinct for when a pattern has yielded enough and needs to be gently retired. Repetitive Music vol. 1 ultimately plays like a sketchbook of focused studies, each track testing how much feeling and movement can be coaxed from limited means. It is experimental in the truest sense: not bombastic, but patient; less about showcasing technique than about seeing what happens when a simple idea is allowed to persist in slightly changing conditions. As the pieces accumulate, they form their own quiet world, one in which time blurs and the distinction between background and foreground listening starts to dissolve.
Lee 'Scratch' Perry’s Disco Devil Vol. 5 continues this run of late-’70s Black Ark material, where extended mixes, heavy bass and studio experimentation collide. As with previous volumes, this set gathers rare and sought-after discomixes, pairing vocal cuts with Perry’s unmistakable dub touch. Junior Murvin features prominently, while cuts from Twin Roots, Watty Burnett, Keith Texon and Michael Campbell round out the selection. Across the record, Perry’s production blurs the line between song and version, letting rhythms stretch, echo and unravel into deep, hypnotic territory. A vital snapshot of the Black Ark at full power, capturing the looseness and invention that defined Perry’s most celebrated era.
Re-up of vital 1975-’77 dubs by the wee legend, cooked up long, strong and odd at his fabled Black Ark Studio for DJ play and dancers’ satisfaction. The 4th in a slew of cherry-picking Perry comps scrolls farthest back into his golden era of productions with six top drawer examples of his innovative tekkerz developed at the storied Black Ark Studio. Up top, his psychoacoustic magick is in effect on an hypnotic Upsetter special edit of Augustus Pablo’s melodica meditation ‘Vibrate On’ and 8 mins of gorgeous choral harmonies and toasting to ‘History’ by Carlton Jackson, and Perry with his crackshot band on the Rasta devotional ’Stay Dread / Kingdom of Dub’ edit. Down below, ‘Babylon Deh Pon Fire’ sets flames to the B-side along with Junior Murvin’s signature falsetto on the anti-gravity steppa ‘Tedious’, and Raphael Green’s ‘Rasta Train.’
Sublime downbeat pressure for the horizontally-inclined, from Lyon-based Jonnnah, chasing 2025’s co:clear side with a 2nd session of tumescent ambient textures and rolling pulses that feels like Sa Pa, CS + Kreme or even his near namesake, Jonnine, slipping off the page into deep beatdown hypnagogia... "Conceived as a form of therapy, as much as a reflection and a testimony, the record retraces a process of introspection and confrontation with one’s own history, looking back at origins, DNA, and the invisible ties that connect us to our ancestors, while opening paths toward new connections. The double-sided structure of the album makes this journey tangible. The first side lingers in uncertainty : opaque atmospheres, fragmented rhythms, and restless textures mirror the doubts, questions, and fragile states of self-analysis. The second side, in contrast, embraces clarity and resolution, dense yet luminous soundscapes where reconciliation and acceptance take shape, culminating in The Blue Comet, a piece charged with finality and revelation. Opening with the multipart suite N-zero, symbolizing the beginning of therapy, and closing with O-one, evoking the soul’s original purity, the record traces a complete emotional and spiritual cycle. Between them, the third edition of Insomnia Never Ends once again portrays the struggle between sleep and the irresistible pull of musical distraction, a fragile tension that runs through the album as a whole. The record condenses Jonnnah’s language into something rawer and more direct. Layers of dub and dub sonic resonate against ethereal ambient passages, while techno impulses maintain tension and forward motion. Each piece feels at once intimate and expansive, designed as much for solitary listening as for collective experience. A new chapter in Jonnnah’s trajectory, the album is a document of transformation : from shadow to light, from questioning to acceptance."
Levi Bruce returns to Pacific Rhythm under his Unknown Mobile moniker for the first time since 2019 with a project entitled Field Work. The project is focused around field recordings taken during the winter and spring of 2025. These recordings come from both his travels abroad while on tour and areas near his home in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, located on the traditional lands of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council and Kwanlin Dün First Nation. Each field recording acts as the basis for a journal entry taken at the location. Raw data was used to reflect on the people, actions, and environmental elements connected to the site through additional production and manipulation.
A very cinematographic journey in between Ambient and Experimental, with a certain touch of Balearic right in the middle of the Leftfield. A super trippy trip, gifted by beautiful melodies and vocals like on the titles “Indisponible” or “Mambo n6”… as if you were crossing a super cozy desert on LSD, starting from the coast after a nice bath in the sea to the dryness of the sand under the sun, with intense divagations like on “Fastelavn” or “Kompasitu” to long relief of contemplations like on “Opium Swing” or “Blizzard” at the end of the way... This is a full immersive experience, one of those life soundtrack releases, and probably one of our favorite release ever.
APORIAMOR noun 1. The death of love’s contradiction. | “Embody APORIAMOR” Etymology aporia-: an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory. from Greek aporos ‘impassable’, from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage’ -amor: love. Sentimiento intenso del ser humano que, partiendo de su propia insuficiencia, necesita y busca el encuentro y unión con otro ser. Del latín amor. -mor: latin for death. APORIAMOR explores the affective ontological and organic processes of love and lust in the turmoil of an urban existence, through the female lens. It expresses the process of strengthening through heartbreak in its various forms. With her debut EP The Art of the Concrete, elsas knew that by giving that name to a record which was ironically expansive and experimental, she would be calling for a distilled and clearer path further down the line. This is what she’s been incorporating into the sonic world of this new EP, APORIAMOR, signifying the birth of a more matured and distilled version of herself as an artist. With APORIAMOR (“the death of love’s contradiction”) elsas conveys a personal process of healing in the romantic space. Through different experiences of heartbreak, elsas builds a language - a coping mechanism attached to its subsequent artistic expression – that isn’t founded on hardness or a closing-off, but instead, on a playful but profound reckoning, and learning of self-worth. APORIAMOR embraces the complexities of being a lover-girl: of moving through life with an open heart. It celebrates the clarity, sweet hindsight, and detachment that come from processing emotion. APORIAMOR is both an affirmation and a release. elsas makes canonical blends with a forward boundary-bending vision. Her sound in this record is naturally referential of both her Mediterranean heritage and UK alternative music — intrinsic parts of her lived experience. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with artists she deeply admires, each exchange enriching her creative world. The experience of working hand-in-hand with Sampha for the last 3 years and ongoingly has been a core of her evolution as an artist. She has also collaborated in many forms with artists like Florence + the Machine, Little Simz, Jordan Rakei, Jockstrap, Obongjayar, Black Country New Road, Genevieve Artadi (KNOWER) and Duval Timothy. Additionally, her ongoing work with the Idrîsî Ensemble, of which she is a core member, continues to inform her artistic depth. The making of this largely self-produced record unfolded over four years — “it’s a well-kneaded dough,” she says. These songs evolved through exposure to multiple environments: from early writing sessions in her childhood home in the Spanish countryside, to stages across the U.S. while on tour supporting Sampha. Experimentation and modulation are an intrinsic part of elsas’ method, conceiving songs as organisms that respond to their surroundings. Collaborators on this collection of songs include Shrink, Will Lister, Gabriel Gifford, Ethan P. Flynn and more. The record was mixed by David Wrench (a long-time supporter of elsas’) and Nathan Boddy, and mastered by Matt Colton. With APORIAMOR, elsas creates a visual world from the fabulation of the past, as an act of playful historical revisionism in which she embeds herself as both subject and storyteller. The songs function like an archive of her experiences across various years, each one unearthed and presented as some sort of archaeological artifact. Through this body of work, elsas begins to conceptualize herself as a legacy artist: one who honors the archive of her own becoming while emerging as a distinct and resonant voice in today’s musical landscape.
Aspen Edities is pleased to present Aerial, the third album of the experimental quartet Oker. Whereas their album debut Husene våre er museer (2018) and its follow-up Susurrus (2021) focused on collective and individual compositions, Aerial features two longform pieces of fully improvised music, sculpted from the recognizable acoustic sound palette that the quartet has developed across a decade of extensive touring. The titles, Aerial, Equinoctial Tide and Crepuscular Rays refer to meteorological and planetary phenomena, and in Oker’s interplay we hear light, wind, clouds, and tidal cycles transpire as shimmering, roaring, rubbing, coalescing and diverging environments of sound. The sonic stoicism and minimalism in their expression is challenged by frictioning micro-chaoses, combining to create calm, winding paths of musical detail and form. Echoing our planet and its meteorological reality, Aerial yields both consistency and perpetual change.
On Nocturnes, Jesse Hackett steps into the shadows, unveiling a deeply personal album of spectral piano and gothic chamber pieces. The record channels a sense of lingering unease and creeping dread and signals a new direction in Hackett’s unpredictable oeuvre. We were delighted when Jesse reached out to propose a collaboration on what he described as his most personal work to date. Written and produced during a particularly difficult period, Nocturnes plunges the listener into a beautifully eerie world of rain-soaked twilight jazz and gothic chamber music. Reminiscent of the soundtrack to an imagined Giallo thriller or Hammer Horror film, the album is deeply cinematic and evocative, conjuring unsettling mental images: shapeless presences lingering at the edges of uneasy dreams, candlelight casting wavering shadows, and unspeakable secrets hidden in the run-down bars and lounges of London’s bohemian underbelly. For Nocturnes, Jesse returns to the piano as his primary means of expression and collaborates with saxophonist and flautist Finn Peters. Together, they channel spirits summoned during late nights listening to the works of Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen, and the jazz lineage of Bill Evans and Charles Mingus. The album is released on 27th February 2026 in a limited edition of 250 copies - black vinyl in a reverse board sleeve. Jesse Hackett is a London-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter renowned as a musical chameleon, shifting style and mood while working across genres. He is best known as a longtime live keyboard and synthesizer player for Gorillaz, contributing to their performances and recordings from 2010 to 2022. Alongside this, he has been involved in a wide array of globe-spanning projects, including the Afro-Futurist ensembles Owiny Sigoma Band, Ennanga Vision, and Nyege Nyege Tapes favourites Metal Preyers and Teeth Agency. In parallel, he has released warped synth-funk under the name Elmore Judd and forms one half of the experimental pop production duo Blludd Relations.
Wanda Felicia returns to Timmion Records with ‘Reflections Of Love’ b/w ‘All In The Game’, two tracks drawn from her debut Now Is The Time.... Backed by the analogue warmth of Cold Diamond & Mink, the release highlights the strength and character of Felicia’s voice. ‘Reflections Of Love’ leads with a relaxed funk pulse, Felicia gliding over the groove with a performance that balances confidence and tenderness. The result is both heartfelt and effortlessly danceable. On the flip, ‘All In The Game’ shifts into a slower, beat-driven ballad. Over a patient, steady rhythm, Felicia delivers a measured and soulful vocal that speaks to resilience and the unfolding nature of love. Together, the two tracks reveal complementary sides of her approach, confirming Wanda Felicia as one of Timmion Records’ most distinctive voices.
Two turntables and a microphone. There is a truth in the clarity of that simple coda, a truth that also belies the breadth of what is possible within its confines. Sometimes you gotta get reminded. I Guess U Had To Be There, the new album from NYC rapper ELUCID and veteran producer Sebb Bash, is one of those ones. So fresh it sounds like it was made tomorrow, but bet money you could put this on in '89 and get heads bopping.
There are moments in music when masters of their craft cross paths at the height of their respective powers - records like Madvillainy, Liquid Swords, Dr. Octagonecologyst, and Hell Hath No Fury - where the result is more than the sum of its parts. ELUCID and Sebb Bash find themselves in this heady, seemingly effortless ephemera on I Guess U Had To Be There. Everything is both familiar and groundbreaking. The beats shift and flip under ELUCID's feet but he tightropes it all, delivery nimble as a mountain goat, producer and rapper moving in perfect synchronization. Some shining stars make memorable appearances: billy woods, Breezly Brewin, Estee Nack, Shabaka Hutchings. But this is a two-man show, and the duo keep the spotlight where it belongs. I Guess U Had To Be There is a captivating, convention-defying listen and a high-water mark for two of the best artists in the genre.
Rio’s Felinto channel the punkish ‘80s vim and license of Os Replicantes on a pair of crazed, shouty, scrappy calls to resistance, issued in aid of activists in the favelas.
"Fresh from annihilating EU/UK audiences with his steppas tropicalia on the Bokeh Dekalog tour, Felinto presents a crazed vision of Sao Paulo party punk - industrial scuzz, dub squelch, grinding guitars and riot-ready vocals.
Festa Punk is a call to rage, to ritual, to celebration — as forms of resistance against the grim, creeping global fascism. It’s a shout to bend time, to create moments that shake off erased identities and flip the script on a world that treats violence like gospel.
It's also a homage to Brazilian hxc heroes, Os Replicantes, whose classic 'Fest Punk' appeared on the '87 LP Histórias De Sexo E Violência."
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.
A sequel. An escalation. Pressure spikes from bar one: future-facing, low-latency. A firmware update for the body. Cuts bite into cuts. Fragments swarm, collide, die out. Drums stumble until they speak; samples crop up without names and leave without warning. Momentum is the one and only rule. Unpredictable, gridless, post-genre. From TikTok feed to vinyl: born digital, cut for the floor. The glitch grows a body, develops a nervous system. Match it or get out of the way. Damned be the ones that are stuck on tradition.
FELT enters 2026 with a newly established sub label for reissues, retrospectives and oddball adjacent non-FELT material under the anagram catch-all LEFT. First on the agenda is a vinyl issue of a modern classical tape by Danish guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth, founding member of the band Iceage. Initially released on a limited cassette edition and plucked from the vast catalogue of the Copenhagen label Posh Isolation, the solo project Health & Safety can be read as composers meditation on anxiety, depression, insomnia and all the damned things they entangle. Wieth moves across the spectrum with dour, deliberate keys, mangled drone fx, barely-there violin scrapes, erratic chimes and whistles and with a knowing pace that feels akin to a guiding hand. We’re unsure if the form of each piece is meant to directly correlate to the drug so referenced but the quiet fever dream atmosphere of the 25 minutes also blurs each piece into a whole. This quote from Wieth certainly rings true for the highly introspective nature of Health & Safety - “You should be very careful listening to too much music when you're writing an album. It has a tendency to become a little too explicit”
Cult digidub mutators Froid Dub slow their steez to deeply knackered, ghostly levels on a follow-up to joints with Krikor and Ransom Note. Back with Parisian patrons Delodio, the pair bring a deep studio knowledge earned since the ‘90s (and their days together as Bosco) to a half hour of purposefully sluggish pressure slanted at the earliest or latest hours of the night/day. With Black Roots Players’ ‘Slow Tempo’ riddim possibly in the back of their mind, they keep it all heavily downbeat and rent with a psychoacoustic nous that draws lines between The Black Ark, GRM, and DJ Screw. ‘Deep’ feels like the onset of a space cake, all super blunted vox and wiggy synths, and ‘The Swap’ snaps tightly to slowed digidub templates, next to echoes of ’Slow Tempo’ in the cranky chords of the title tune. They really let the bass flare in acres of space on the spangled zingers ‘Too Digital’ and an acidic ‘Love’, whilst crossing lines with Full Circle’s proto-goa trance in ‘Diggin’’ and the swampy motion of ‘No Sense’.
A mutant beat manifesto from Miami luminaries Jonathan Trujillo (Jonny from Space) and Pablo Arrangoiz (El Gusano, DJ Fitness, Baüzer Vep), Crespi Drum Syndicate’s Colada Talk follows the duo’s debut on Sonido Isla with a freshly freaked collection of percussive oddities. Rooted in foundational clave rhythms and avant-garde experimentation, Crespi Drum Syndicate emerges from the amphibious underbelly of Miami’s Latin-infused club scene with their singular electro-acoustic vision. Extensive live recording sessions, free improvisation, and a ritualistic studio practice — countless hours spent twisting and rearranging sounds from found objects and Buchla modular systems — coalesce into new rhythmic forms. Atonal saxophone, bass clarinet, and slide whistle further expand upon Trujillo and Arrangoiz’s ever-evolving sonic palette, while NYC’s AceMo lends a hand on the heavily syncopated “Siu,” and closer “Boubow” might be the duo’s most hook-driven production to date with its mangled pop vocal and lewd drum-line bounce. Landing somewhere between Steve Reich’s polyrhythmic “Six Marimbas,” Moebius & Plank’s industrial Krautrock sessions, and Ricardo Villalobos’ hypnotic techno minimalism, Colada Talk delivers on a world of subtropical rhythmic futurism and experimental body music that’s as heady as it is culo-shaking. -Phil Cho
Crying Outcast returns with its third release, landing close to home with legendary dub innovator The Rootsman. Bradford’s own and a true pioneering force in experimental dub since the 90s, The Rootsman’s influence can be deeply traced throughout the underground. Roots Return gathers three essential works from his catalogue, including collaborations with Celtarabia and Russ (The Disciples) as Pachakuti, alongside a light-headed reinterpretation from label head Miles J Paralysis.
John Howes continues his micro-dub techno work as Paperclip Minimiser, landing on Blank Mind with Topology Transform. Drawn from the same sessions as his recent album, these three tracks extend his finely tuned, system-led approach. Based in the UK’s North West, Howes builds custom tools via Cong Burn, shaping a sound that threads broken techno, clicks-and-cuts minimalism and UK bass. The A side pairs fast, detailed percussion with a more open half-time counterpart, while the B side moves into a beatless ambient stretch. Across the record, precision meets warmth, with each track reinforcing a cohesive, carefully engineered sound world.
Go Hirano - Piano, Pianica, Windchime, Percussion, Electronics, and Effects
Tracks A1, A2, A4, B1, B4 recorded live in October 2020 at Pianola Records, Tokyo
Piano Tuning and voicing by Emi Hatakeyama
Recorded by Makoto Oshiro
The remaining tracks were recorded in the late 1980's-2019 and remixed in 2019
Robert Stillman didn’t set out to make a concept album about Steve Jobs. But as a composer and improviser whose music asks questions about his relationship with reality, a curiosity about the promises and follies of technology took him there. Following an intuitive path from James Bridle’s acclaimed book on non-human intelligence Ways of Being to the seminal 1995 essay “The California Ideology”, Stillman arrived at Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs – and what would become the catalyst for his new album. “10,000 Rivers points to an alternative narrative about a man who is tormented by the instability of his reality, so tries to invent his way out of it,” Stillman explains. “Ultimately, his tech designs become expressions of his will to replace the messy, disordered, temporary nature of the world with something that strives to be barely physical: streamlined, symmetrical, uncomplicated, and deathless.” Highly original, wholly unclassifiable, 10,000 Rivers is part cultural critique, part sonic biography and takes the form of a series of songs, instrumentals and abstract soundscapes that respond directly to moments or paradigms from Jobs’ life. Stylistically, it leans on Stillman’s relationship with the smooth music of Billy Ocean, Gloria Estefan and 10cc from the ‘80s and early ‘90s, made at what he calls “the knife’s edge between the human and the digital.” “A lot of this music, coincidentally, was contemporary with Jobs’ heyday and the mainstream adoption of his first personal computers,” Stillman continues, revelling in the playful deconstruction of their aspirational and anodyne qualities. Twinkling, synthetic arpeggios sit alongside tumbledown acoustic improvisation – think Mort Garson meets Moondog – fragments of ambient sound collapse into queasy auto-tuned lullabies, the melancholy paradise of Brian Wilson-esque California dreaming dismantled into uncanny free jazz freakouts. Recorded to ½-inch 8 track tape and mixed down in real-time to give it a live, performative quality, the result is a speculative, genreless soundtrack to a man’s life and the wider societal values it came to define. Drawing on his recent collaborations with Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner as touring support and live band-member for The Smile, Stillman’s work has long resisted categorisation, and been presented in a range of media, including installations, performance lectures and 12 solo albums, the most recent of which What Does It Mean to Be American? takes a similarly conceptual scalpel to complex notions of US identity. One of Stillman’s most ambitious and idiosyncratic projects to date, 10,000 Rivers is an elegy for the hubris of a humankind trying to design its way to immortality as it falls apart at the seams.