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'Sweet England' along with its sister album 'False True Lovers', was recorded in the spring of 1958 when I was twenty-two years old. I had been living for the previous two years in London with Alan Lomax, the American folklorist, working for him as editorial assistant on his book The Folk Songs of North America and on his field recordings from America, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. The tracks that make up these two albums were recorded by Peter Kennedy and Alan in two days at Peter's home 'studio' in Belsize Park. English traditional music, at its best, expresses and provides everything in song that I need and feel, both musically and emotionally. Sweet England represents the first shaky steps of a journey that I have been on all my life, and that, happily, I still am." (shirley collins)
From Melbourne, Australia, singer-songwriter Ruth Parker releases her album, Otherwise Occupied, featuring a rich tapestry of acoustic instruments like guitar, ukulele, accordion, bouzouki, cello, and mandolin, all woven together with her delicate and intimate vocals. The sound, which carefully preserves quiet space, places the album squarely within the indie-folk and singer-songwriter lineage. However, its lush textures and mellow resonance also give it a dream-folk quality, resonating with listeners and allowing them to relive moments of introspection and subtle emotional shifts. Rather than focusing on grand gestures, it's an album that rewards those who lean in to appreciate its finer nuances, wrapping you in a gentle and profound sense of depth.
Olvido Records is proud to present African Steel, a follow-up to 2019’s African country-western compilation Bulwayo Blue Yodel. Here we have a compendium of beautiful songs highlighting the early years of the slide guitar in southern, central and eastern Africa. Featuring traditional and popular regional styles adapting the acoustic lap-steel guitar, African Steel reveals intriguing influences from southern American country and blues, Argentinian and European tango, and back to the Hawaiian origins of the instrument, long before the shimmering electric slide guitar of Docteur Nico, and the pedal steel mastery of Demola Adepoju of King Sunny Ade's African Beats. Ranging from up-tempo dance numbers, to plaintive bottleneck-blues style ballads, to a Ugandan string-band cover of a Jimmie Rodgers classic, each song presented here is a unique glimpse into the early years of the slide guitar’s incorporation into various African musical cultures. These fourteen songs have been carefully restored from rare shellac and lacquer discs to honor and celebrate a previously under-represented chapter in global music history, and includes a booklet with contextual notes and translated lyrics.
Music From Memory are thrilled to announce the forthcoming release of ‘Pastoral Blend,’ a new album from the duo of N Kramer and Magnus Bang Olsen (The Zenmenn).
Recorded in Berlin between August 2023 and March 2024, ‘Pastoral Blend’ combines Kramer's improvisational process and mastery of contemporary production techniques with Bang Olsen’s emotive pedal steel guitar playing. The creative process was anchored in capturing various phrases and patterns from the instrument, which were then reshaped, reversed, and layered intricately. This meticulous approach allowed a foundational track to emerge, upon which further arrangements and developments were sculpted. This process, which builds on Kramer's earlier work as Habitat (with J. Foerster, released on Leaving Records), gives the music a gentle asynchronous flow that feels uniquely live and organic.
Merging the warmth and intimacy of instrumental Americana with the glitchy, textural processing reminiscent of early 2000s Max/MSP and influential artists such as Fennesz and Alva Noto, ‘Pastoral Blend’ is a textured drift between analog warmth and digital fragmentation, a delicate equilibrium that duo navigate with remarkable finesse and an air of effortless charm. With titles like ‘Harvest', ‘Agrarian Dawn’, ‘Grasslands’, and ‘Weathered’, Kramer and Bang Olsen evoke a musical vocabulary steeped in themes of landscape, memory, and tradition; a vocabulary that gently alludes to the more familiar and traditional musical structures lying beneath the rich layers of sound. Herein lies the essence of the 'Pastoral Blend’.
‘Pastoral Blend’ will be released on LP and digitally on July 4th 2025. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis.
Following June's brilliant 'Rhythm Archives', Holy Tongue's Al Wootton continues his hot streak, landing on Sähkö with half an hour of hazed, immersive rhythmic experiments, tracking from vintage dub(step) to minimal techno and confidently striding thru percussive forms that echo from the Balkans to North Africa. RIYL Shackleton, Azu Tiwaline, Muslimgauze, T++, Deena Abdelwahed.
Ever since he dispatched with the Deadboy moniker a few years back and reached into dubbier, more percussive spaces, Wootton's been figuring out exactly where his dexterous productions fit in.He's been most at home on his own Trule imprint, operating at his own pace and shaping the aesthetics as he goes, and 'Rhythm Archives' felt like a mark in the sand, a record that matched his interest in vintage gear and classic production methods with his dedication to wide-eyed, punkish experimentation. 'CRUX', his first record for legendary Finnish label Sähkö, follows that lead, assembling four long percussive jams that sound as if they've toppled off the timeline - if someone told us it was material rescued from a forgotten reel-to-reel, we'd believe it.
There's an outline of dubstep visible in the background on opener 'Essene' that's enhanced by the Skull Disco-esque sub-undulations and wormhole-splitting tape echoes, but the hollow hand drum runs and hallucinatory effects shuttle the composition into darker, more reflective landscapes. Similarly, the busted drum machine intro of 'Per Incanto' might reference Sähkö royalty Mika Vainio and Hertsi, but the track veers leftwards, muddling the mix with psychedelic African Head Charge-style reverberations and trapped, timestretched string loops. It's gear that's intended for deep, intentional listening; the tracks don't contain too much melodic content by design - Wootton's rhythms are layered and hypnotic, and anything else is there to reinforce the general spirit.
Just check 'Cloister', the EP's low-key stand-out, where the lead line is literally just tuned feedback, placed to disorient even the most abstinent listener, or 'Armen', that distorts its sputtering Bruce Haack-in-dub atmosphere with ghosted groans and faint remnants of a trip-hop undercurrent that never fully reached optimal pressure. If you've ingested all the psilocybin from Shackleton's recent run, this is yr next drop.
Johnny Sais Quoi makes his entrance to Music From Memory with the 7-track EP entitled ‘Love On Ice.’ Channeling the spirit of Italo-pop and New Wave, ‘Love On Ice’ was crafted in the whirlwind of spontaneity and energy that changing circumstances often bring. Born from transition and exploring themes of leaving, arriving, coming together, and breaking up, ‘Love On Ice’ serves as an outlet to process, escape, and celebrate the challenges of a new life.
Johnny crafts exquisite dancefloor-focused pop—familiar yet unique, imbued with his own touch, a distinctive sensibility, and a knack for infectious hooks. The opener, ‘No Guilty Pleasures,’ sets the tone immediately as Johnny works his magic with a palette of synths, drum machines, picked guitar, and processed vocals. The title track, ‘Love On Ice,’ delivers a classic Italo-infused dancefloor bomb, featuring a driving synth bass line overlaid by hypnotic arpeggios. There is much here for the dancer, but ‘Love On Ice’ also ventures beyond the dance floor; the closing tracks ‘Ref 23’ and ‘Let's Find A Home’ are prime examples, both showcasing Johnny’s depth and range with their melancholic, mellow atmosphere.
‘Love On Ice’ will be released on September 18th on vinyl LP and digitally.
Though Dean Blunt and Danish singer-songwriter Fine Glindvad Jensen are credited, the overall identity of the project remains a mystery. This self-titled debut album by the unit The Crying Nudes has been released on the label World Music Group. Comprising nine songs and clocking in at a compact 15 minutes, the album feels like a collection of short sketches, centered on fragmented acoustic guitar phrases, ambient sounds that make use of empty space, and ethereal vocals enveloped in reverb. With a musical style that prioritizes atmosphere and texture over melody and harmony, and an intentional anonymity that keeps the artists' identities ambiguous, this album exudes a minimalist aesthetic and a captivating mystique.
He was a member of the legendary psychedelic band “Hallelujahs” and “Idiot O'Clock” with Shinji Shibayama and others, which was praised to the highest degree by the late Hideo Iketsuzumi, owner of Modern Music, who presided over the prestigious “P.S.F. Records” that represented the psychedelic underground in Japan. Naoiki Toushi is one of the residents of Kyoto's famous underground music mecca, the rock cafe “Dragstore,” and is also a founding member of the famous Hijokaidan. Released on Shibayama's Org Records label, “III” is one of the most popular cult albums of his career, and has been eagerly awaited by fans and collectors alike for an official reissue, including a bootleg LP reissue from overseas.
A sequel to last year's sublime 'Spectral Evolution', 'Traveling Light' is a suite of weightless, uncannily beautiful jazz standards, transformed into orchestral drones and electronic chirps by Toral and his virtual band. It's flawless material that draws a clear line from Billie Holiday through Clara Rockmore, Fripp & Eno and Alvin Lucier to MBV and Gastr del Sol and beyond. Unmissable gear, from one of the scene's unassailable legends. Culture never emerges from a vacuum. It accumulates and evolves, building on what occurred before and gleaning influence from what happened nearby; the more cultural threads converge, the more complex, nuanced and developed the resulting braids become. Toral acknowledged this fact quite brazenly on last year's 'Spectral Evolution', bringing over a decade of impenetrable off-world experimentation to a halt and shoving his bare hands into the creative soil that inspired iconic tomes like 1995's 'Loveless'-inspired masterpiece 'Wave Field' and the meditative Éliane Radigue-cum-Rhys Chatham 'Violence of Discovery And Calm of Acceptance'. Taking a dip in the pool of concepts that eddy underneath rock music's labyrinth of caverns, he referenced Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, turning vintage progressions into idiosyncratic contemporary gestures. And on 'Traveling Light' that basic theme is expanded again; here, Toral takes six recognizable early 20th century standards and applies a very similar treatment, augmenting them with additional "canonical jazz sounds" from clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flautist Clara Saleiro. Playing guitar and bass with his self-built ensemble of electronic devices (that includes a modified theremin), Toral lets his influences float even closer to the surface here, picking out familiar jazz and exotica flourishes, early electronic echoes and organ-esque polyphonic sustained tones that stretch across hundreds of years of musical history. On opener 'Easy Living', a Ralph Rainger composition from 1937 that's been recorded by Billie Holiday, Bill Evans and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others, the original chord sequence is slackened by Toral's sustained guitar tones and sine waves, but not blurred completely into impressions. This time around we're treated to more tangible shapes: Toral's cheeky, expertly rendered riffs, horizontal exotica-inspired rhythmelodic chimes, intimate woodwind breaths that pull us back to the '30s and squealing pitches that can't help but remind us of Clara Rockmore's Robert Moog-produced milestone 'The Art of the Theremin'. It feels like being chucked in the American cultural petri dish while new organisms mutate around you - everything's recognisable somehow but novel, peculiar. Lovingly valve saturated strums, bent by Toral's whammy, introduce 'Body and Soul' (a 1930 standard that's best known for being recorded by Frank Sinatra) before they're met by alien chirps from his arsenal of generators. But it's the willowy harmonies that buoy this one, echoing the haunted choral drones that prop up centuries of European sacred music. Toral's very specific with his references; when Amado's tenor moans whisper around the dense polyphonic hums, there's a tacit acknowledgement of the enduring influence of African American spirituals and gospel on folk, blues, jazz, country, rock 'n roll and R&B. The album's most affecting segment comes at the conclusion though, with 'My Funny Valentine' and 'God Bless the Child', easily two of the most conspicuous compositions of the era. On both, Toral hovers between clarity and abstraction, overlaying bone-dry fingerpicked improvisations on the former that scrape over Chicago's musical timeline, from "hot jazz" to post-rock, and finishing the album with Fennesz-like distortions that crack and dissolve into Saleiro's levitational flute tones. It's astonishing stuff, honestly - maybe not as immediately startling as 'Spectral Evolution', but refined, polished and concentrated in every way. You're unlikely to find a more moving set this year, that's for sure.
Antigone is a chilling look at our already-alternate reality, coming from inside Eiko Isibashi’s own head. Her band brings a wide array of sounds and moods, shading pop, funk and jazz, ambient, electronic and musique concrète in a bittersweet latticework. Interlocking her new songs in seamless long-play flow with the compositional ambitions of her acclaimed soundtrack work, Eiko’s expressions are epic and intimate. 2025 will never be the same!<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 406px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=507708664/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://eikoishibashi.bandcamp.com/album/antigone">Antigone by Eiko Ishibashi</a></iframe>
Deeeeeep from the Ariwa archives... all unreleased music on here. Sounding absolutely essential to us. Dates of production uknown at time of writing... The A Side is a Mad Professor produced version of Aisha's 'Give a Little Love', given the UK treatment. The Dub is a proper roller. Side B is the unheard African Message Dub (Parts 1& 2). Recordings ft Jah Shaka on bass, Norman Grant (Twinkle Brothers) on Drums, Sgt Pepper and Mad Professor on the desk. Masterful UK Dub from these key figures.... pulled out of nowhere.
Discover New Decade Of Dub by Mad Professor and Jah Shaka on Ariwa Sounds. A UK Dub collaboration from 1996, with Phasers set to stun. Musical and restrained throughout. TIP!
Harnessing the chaos born from endless jams in a remote, rented farmhouse, the album dives deeper into their punk approach to jazz, while opening up space for long-nurtured fascinations with electronic textures and cinematic oddities. Their third album, it features previous singles feely, and bamboo.
The title was pulled from a bank of favourite names after the band saw Ez’s artwork; a quirky world of three cell-like flats housing absurd creatures. 'frank dean and andrew' nods to the anonymous, everyday passersby whose lives quietly unfold in the background of a nondescript town.
Pulling back the curtain on its creation further, the band reveals, “The album was recorded at the end of a year of extreme highs and lows. The tensions play out in the music in weird ways... the feeling of the music is very particular, and peculiar. Most UK Jazz music can end up too arranged and neat, or generally optimistic in mood, whereas this album goes the other way in all aspects.”
At the album's core, the glitchy, late-night focus track red in tokyo features Chinese-Vietnamese-British rapper Jianbo, whose grimey, distorted flows cut through growling guitar riffs and a dragging, drill-like drum line. “It’s a weird, grimey anger with a touch of no-wave and post-punk,” the band explains, “Hari’s bass ended up sounding like a Japanese Koto”. The intensity is fitting, as Jianbo recounts a tense moment in Tokyo that left him “seeing red.”
Shifting through moods, the second track oscillates to life with a dubby bassline and bursts of distant, animalistic commotion, like a flock scattering after a disturbance. With unsettling keys and guitar, the instrumental upends the familiar contours of jazz and leaves a lingering unease as part of what the band calls the album’s “weird, off-key” side. Equally unexpected, the title, horticulturalists nightmare (birds), taps into the surreal fear lurking in the pulsing soundscape.
That freeform, borderless creativity carries into grilly, where the keys lay out the pace and mood. “The tempo and the ambience frame the track to be like a dance tune, but with a darkness from Burial-type ambiences and pulsing drill-style delays,” the band notes. As horn layers clear the haze, the jam’s raw energy and feeling come together as a transportive piece.
Taking a dip into the melancholic, toucan opens with a whir and solemn, ceremonial horns, underpinned by a mellow harmony that moves into far-off, choral-like overlays. Opening with a similarly dystopian eeriness is location, the band’s favourite. From the heavy slump of the drums to the three-piece horns of Dan, Akers, and Jonny, which counterpoint each other in a sea of reverb. The tune is named after a Playboi Carti song of the same name, inspired by the opening synth movement.
The title track, frank dean and andrew, flickers with a bittersweet nostalgia, capturing for Ebi Soda, a modern sense of indifference, a stay-at-home, it-is-what-it-is kind of resignation. It mirrors the mood of the figures on the album artwork: sitting alone in flats, suspended in quiet isolation. Lou’s chords, Hari’s chordal bass, and Sam’s laid-back tempo lay down a "loose, Midwest, emo undercurrent, a tone that runs deep in much of the hyperpop" the band had been absorbing. Will vocalises through the trombone, making it sound as though someone is singing down a crackling phone line. A flugelhorn overdub adds more warmth to the track’s slow-burning atmosphere, with trombone and sax joining the mix in the second half.
Closing the album is insectoid creatures are infesting the land, beginning as a dissonant, scattered hellscape of wailing improvisations, freewheeling robotic noise, and buckling delays that eventually rupture into a cinematic scape, giving way to an ascending sequence of hopeful, mood-settling melodies.
As a whole, the album’s character arises from stylising with production and mixing. The approach fluctuates between focusing on ambience and reverb, drawing from UK dubstep influences like Zomby, Burial, and Joe Armon-Jones’ collaborations with Maxwell Owin, and embracing the raw, grainy DIY ‘mixtape’ sound, inspired by artists like Athletic Progression, Yameii Online, and Playboi Carti.
1993 debut album by the trio of Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns. Unavailable on vinyl and CD since original release. Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Colton, contains “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix)” for the first time on the 2LP edition.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 406px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1463976360/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://warprecords.bandcamp.com/album/sabresonic-remastered">Sabresonic (Remastered) The Sabres Of Paradise</a></iframe>
Percussionist Tim Barnes has had a lengthy career flying as close as possible to the sun, notably performing and recording with Jim O’Rourke, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Silver Jews, Tony Conrad, John Zorn, Faust, Tower Recordings, Alan Licht and many others.
Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2021, Lost Words is the first of two recordings undertaken after Tim’s diagnosis. These new collabs were coordinated and produced by Ken (Bundy) Brown (Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Pullman) and feature Joshua Abrams, Oren Ambarchi, David Daniell, John Dieterich, Darin Gray, Glenn Kotche, Tara Jane O’Neil, Jim O’Rourke and Ken Vandermark among others. Tim’s stalwart rhythmic zeal is the lynchpin and common ground across these tracks that span a wide swath of styles.
Drag City reissues Land of Plenty, the recorded debut from Chicago guitar duo Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker. Captured live during a January 2015 residency at the Whistler, these performances showcase two kindred spirits in full creative flight, blending their influences into a seamless, intuitive exchange. Meeting only a year before the recording, MacKay and Walker found common ground in artists as varied as Albert King, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Ali Akbar Khan and Jimi Hendrix. Across six-strings, twelve-strings and requinto, they weave a dialogue that draws from blues, folk, jazz and global traditions, folding them effortlessly into each other in real time. The set brims with interplay, each player listening and responding with precision and imagination. The stereo mix keeps their guitars distinct while capturing the shared headspace where improvisation and composition meet. Live recording adds an extra charge, amplifying the richness and detail in their sound. Originally released on Whistler in 2015, Land of Plenty stands as one of the most dynamic and engaging acoustic guitar records of its era — a document of two musicians discovering just how far their combined energies could take them.
Eric Broucek was the ur-engineer of the most fertile era of DFA Studios, from about 2003 to 2008 (no one knows anything precisely about that time, as it’s all lost in the fog of chaos). His hand was on all of the remixes, LPs, dance 12s. He was there in that over-designed gear dungeon almost every day, recording, mixing, struggling to not roll his eyes at Tim and me. And somewhere in that fog, he quietly dropped limited runs of three 12-inch delayed reaction bombs on his own label Stickydisc Recordings—two under the name Babytalk, and one as Watussi with another DFA regular, Morgan Wiley.
Back in the day, Eric did not want his music released on DFA. He wanted to forge his own identity, which he did, sending out music that wandered from the DFA path with its uniquely wonky, upended and understated power. His music is so unlike everything else of that era, so profoundly singular, that it still sounds completely out of time.
A few years back, I started DJing the tracks again, and saw how the world was still surprised by what Eric had made, and the idea of this compilation was born.
So, in the end, Eric, we totally got to release your records anyway. We heart you, man.
-James Murphy
All Portrait, No Chorus is the new album from indie rap pioneer doseone and NYC producer Steel Tipped Dove, dropping January 10, 2025. Together, these two artists have crafted an uncompromising masterpiece. Knowing the caliber of MC he is paired with, dove skillfully paints with every color on the palette, and doseone skates effortlessly on every track, whether skating languid figure 8s or landing lyrical triple axels. Somehow the veteran sounds sharper than ever and the songs are lean and hungry, cut to the quick.
It is no accident that this project is released under the Backwoodz Studioz imprint; the road that leads to this collaboration starts with, of all things, a ShrapKnel demo. Here is how dose explains it:
“I have been inspired by Backwoodz for a while, in many ways, but the most potent being all these distinct pens. September 2023, I had heard a nearly done version of ShrapKnel’s latest record, and something snapped in me. Hearing that perfectly hungry, inspired rapping turned my power back on. For me, being inspired warrants telling those who are inspiring you, so [once I heard Decay] I reached out and sent Fatboi Sharif and dove some kind words about that record. The rest is history.”
At the end of December 2023 dove sent dose the first beat pack. Somewhere around the second week of January 2024 dose already had five songs written and recorded. By the middle of March, a rough album framework was essentially done, and they brought on Minneapolis producer Andrew Broder to freak the turntables across the whole project. Then, as a final piece, dose and dove added select collaborations from some of their favorite rappers. By the end of April it was done.
“I’m not really a features guy, but to align with and connect with those who inspire me, I called in some beautiful humans I had never worked with but always meant to: Open Mike Eagle, M.Sayyid, billy woods, Fatboi Sharif, and Myka 9 connect eras, artists, and styles of unconventional rap I hold incredibly dear,” doseone explains.
Listening to All Portrait, No Chorus you can hear the battery in doseone’s back as he pythons his way through each instrumental. For his part, steel tipped dove—a prolific producer over the last two years—delivers some of the most diverse work of his career. The result is a dynamic, propulsive listen that casts its crackling energy in every direction except backwards.
Pick a small spot (a point) in front of you (a small knot of wood, a dog down the way). And tightly focus on this spot. And now slowly unfocus your gaze. Widen your gaze. Pan out without moving your eyes. Take it all in.
A smeared and pixelated surface, swelling of contour and light. (Monet’s seepages of light, Altman’s overlapping nomadic dialogue.) Once you have unfocused with little to no center of attention, slowly close your eyes. And please feel very free to notice the light. All of the light that your eyes knocked back as you dilated your focal point. This exercise can be repeated a few times. Unfocusing does not always come easily. And it is probably best to not put too much effort into it. Best to not employ too much pressure.
And we will not put too much pressure on this exercise to help us explain away the humidly, saturatedly psychedelic canopy of moan-‘n-twang and slackelastic-groove of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sasquatch Landslide.
Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”
Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.
There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognizable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.
A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.
Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty
Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025
Jana IRMERT « Portals » Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity. Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert. 7038634357 « Rope » With uncommon mastery and precision, Rope unfolds in a suspended time that seems nonetheless ominous. As its title suggests, Rope explores the formal figure of the rope, as an interweaving of synthetic and natural fibres that hold and amalgamate, held together by the forces of tension and friction. The rope itself, as Neo Gibson explains, is knotted at regular intervals along its entire length, so that you can hang on to it. Rope unfolds slowly, evolving from the threshold of the perceptible towards denser, more ballasted electronic textures, but always on the brink of an upheaval to come. Then a melodic motif appears, seeming to carry within it an impossible consolation. In this respect, Rope balances strikingly between formal elegance, sonic gravity and an emotional charge that is almost uncontainable.