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The title of this work by Beatrice Dillon is taken from the notion of ‘basho’, developed by Kitarō Nishida, Japanese philosopher and father of the Kyoto school. Kitaro’s ‘basho’ (場所) refers to a fundamental ‘place’ or ‘field’ where things exist and interact. Not just a physical location, but a more abstract space where all experiences, thoughts, and phenomena are interconnected. In Nishida’s philosophy, ‘basho’ is a dynamic, living ground where subject and object, self and world, are not separate but mutually interrelated. Inspired by this, Beatrice Dillon develops a music of a complex nature, that never ceases to constitute itself as pure presentation, constantly re-exposed, reactivating at every moment both the object of attention and the listener who aims at it. Borrowing both its sounds (which have no real origin or internal space) and its idioms from electronic music, Dillon's Basho is a diversion, a rearrangement that places us, through elements that are familiar but suddenly alien, back into a field of pure listening.
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Still Forms, by Japanese composer Hideki Umezawa, draws its sound material from the exploration of Baschet sound structures, instruments developed by the brothers Bernard and François Baschet in the 1950s that have since been highly prized by the world of contemporary musical creation. These structures were presented at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, and some remained in Japan. Through various recording sessions, in Japan but also in France, Hideki Umezawa re-explores the fascinating sonic potential of these atypical instruments to include them in a highly mastered composition where sounds of acoustic origin and electronic textures respond to each other, as in the distorted reflection of the resonators of the Baschet structures. Still Forms is thus a tribute to, and a journey through time through, the incredible power of inspiration and invention of these sound structures, but also a sharpened proposal of contemporary electroacoustic composition that knows how to renew itself without denying its origins.
How do I know if my cat likes me? is the first offering from organists Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall with visual artist Hanne Lippard, an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday. First developed during Arkbro and Lippard’s 2023 residency at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, the album satirizes, in prim deadpan, the stultifying aesthetics of corporate life, from hold music to online banking. How do I know if my cat likes me? extends the lineage of Roberts Ashley and Barry’s droll concept poetry, hammering at the sounds of language until they dislodge all signifieds through pleasurably numbing repetition. Listening to the record is like doing a Captcha over and over until all the characters fuzz to hieroglyphs, or finding yourself mired in a tautological customer-service argument—except that, after you dead-end at nonsense, you stumble into an unexpectedly transcendent beauty, where language flips from pure function to pure aesthetic, shimmering with possibility.
Even subtle ruptures in lyrical or musical patterns can trigger a fundamental shift in the world of the song. Throughout the record, strict formalism and minimalism beget narrative. “The long goodbye” imagines an excruciating dialogue between acquaintances who can’t politely disengage: “It’s my pleasure!” deadpans Lippard, who replies to herself, “Pleasure is all mine! / See you soon! / See you next time! / See you then!” Though the lines recycle the same few parting words, a mysterious causality accumulates in the minute variations, creating a narrative arc less for the characters of the song than for the listener, who might confront despair, nihilistic humor, or profound gratitude at the capacity of art to encompass any of this—not necessarily in that order. Elsewhere, as “Modern Spanking” free-associates its way from the phrase “online banking” toward “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy but bankrupt banking,” a whole world of perfunctory pleasures comes into focus. While minimalist movements in music and visual art foster a certain situatedness of the view, “Modern Spanking” evokes the slick, frictionless minimalism of an upscale mall: a crowd of desultory passersby drifting between sex and money, fantasy and reality, scattered attention and intense distraction. In a world like this, the distinction between banking and spanking becomes negligible.
RIYL: Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom, Robert Ashley, Robert Wyatt.
From Where You Came unspools as a series of nocturnal transmissions, altered-state refinements, and vivid stories, rich in vibrant, illuminating qualities. Indexing 19th century programmatic music, mid-’70s jazz, and a distinctively colourful and multi-dimensional approach to composition that embraces improvisation, Coverdale alloys synthesis with live instrumentation in a gesture of reconnection with land and body through sound. Approaching composition as a diagnostic methodology to spiritual ends, she conducts emotional resonance like currents of charge, hard-wiring the purely felt into electronic signals.
Though written and recorded on several continents, including at the GRM Studio in Paris and the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm, From Where You Came was completed in rural Ontario, Canada. Featuring contributions from multidisciplinary sound artist and cellist Anne Bourne and trombonist Kalia Vandever, the album’s 11 expansive yet condensed compositions incorporate strings, woodwind, brass, keys, software and modular synthesis, inscribing a musical language that resonates animations with unfiltered, striking clarity. Coverdale's own voice melts into air amidst the enveloping swell of the album’s opening prelude: “Everything you know is real,” she sings on “Eternity,” “I’m sorry, life is beautiful… .” As though in response, oscillating vividly between animism and animalism, the album that follows is brimming with life in all its stunning complexity.
Reckoning with the experience of grief, dislocation, and the pressure of total freedom and independence, Coverdale yields supernatural capacity to alchemize tribulation into highly imaginative and inspiring fantasy epics of sound. In the piloted flight of “Daze,” wind choruses dance and twirl in ornate punctuated cycles as dissonant portamentos annotate modulatory ascent to soaring heights, gliding and churning across turbulent gails to new pockets of harmonic plateaus, stabilizing periodically through rhythmic gait for rest. It feels like the joy of flight. In other spiritual quests, sound becomes a feat of physics; physical and subterranean, material, and even destructive, amongst highland drone figures in “Freedom.” Melancholic restlessness and will-summoning entrench furtive flurries of energy on “Coming Around,” skittish, tacit, and reluctantly yearning chimes illuminate a granular “Problem of No Name,” and ecstatic, messy-haired catharsis blurts release through the drummed sample-based sequences of “Offload Flip.”
Each new narrative finds rootedness in a changing environment, giving a sense this is ecological adaptation made into music, as a way to navigate being in the world. Speaking directly to the rootlessness and alienation of modernity while processing the thrill and pain of being alive, From Where You Came draws immense strength through a commitment to material groundedness, from where we are able to view the scale of our own mythology, the worlds we want to build, and the stories we are determined to tell.
Aunes is a rare solo album from peripatetic Australian cellist-composer-performer Judith Hamann, presenting six pieces recorded across several years and countries. Developing the collage techniques and expanded sound palettes heard on their previous releases, Aunes makes use of synthesizers, organ, voice and location recordings alongside the dazzlingly pure, enveloping tones of Hamann’s cello. The record takes its name from an old French unit of measurement for fabric, varying around the country and from material to material. Unlike the platinum metre bar deposited in the National Archives after the Revolution as an immovable standard, an aune of silk differed from an aune of linen: the measure could not be separated from the material. In much the same way, in these six pieces—which Hamann thinks of as ‘songs’—formal aspects such as tuning, pacing, melodic shape and timbre are not abstractions applied universally to musical material but are inextricable from the instruments and sounds used, even from the places and communities in which the music was made.
Audible location sound embeds the music in its place of making, as in the delicate duet for church organ and wordless singing ‘schloss, night’, where shuffles and cluttering in the reverberant church space form a phantom accompaniment, gradually displaced by a uneasy shimmer of wavering tones from half-opened organ stops. ‘Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore’ documents a walk up a hill to an outdoor mass in Chiusure, layering voices near and far with footsteps, insects and other incidental sounds. Like in the work of Moniek Darge or Luc Ferrari, location recordings are folded on themselves in space and time, their documentary function dislocated to dreamlike effect. On other pieces, it is the emphatic presence of the performing body that grounds the music, whether in the intimate fragility of Hamann’s softly sung and hummed vocal tones or the clothing that rustles across a microphone on the opening ‘by the line’. The idea of a music inextricable from its material conditions is perhaps most strikingly communicated on the album’s briefest piece ‘bruststärke (lung song)’, composed from layered whistling recorded while Hamann suffered through an asthma flare up, the results halfway between field recordings of an imaginary aviary and the audiopoems of Henri Chopin.
More than any of Hamann’s previous solo works, a strong melodic sensibility runs through Aunes, even when, like on ‘seventeen fabrics of measure’, the music hangs together by the merest thread. At other points, Hamann’s love of pop music is more obvious: the rich synth harmonies of ‘by the line’ could almost be a melting fragment of a backing track from Hounds of Love. The expansive closing piece ‘neither from nor toward’ exemplifies the highly personal musical language that Hamann has developed in recent years through constant solo performance (and a rigorous discipline of instrumental practice), pairing two overdubbed voices with the boundless depth and harmonic richness of just-intoned cello notes, calling up Ockegham or Linda Caitlin Smith in its elegiac slow motion arcs. Hamann’s most personal work yet, Aunes arrives in a striking sleeve reproducing a section of a painting made from sewn pieces of dyed wool by Wilder Alison, a friend and fellow resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude, one of the temporary homes where much of this music was recorded. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 340px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1362798960/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/aunes">Aunes by Judith Hamann</a></iframe>
There are poets like the great Mary Oliver, who might suggest that one’s primary function when moving through the world, for as long as they have life and the ability to move through the world, is to play close attention to that which others may foolishly call small, or quotidian. The brain and heart are both containers, with as much space as you wish for them to have, and to live is to create collections of found affections. Sounds from your beloved and familiar blocks, movements of the trees and the people beneath them, the way someone you adore may hold you for a few lingering seconds before releasing from a hug and vanishing into a crowded crosswalk. To think of our living, our making, and our loving in this way means that, at least for some of us, we may be propelled forward by the prospect of what’s next. What moment we can hold and place in our overflowing pockets.
The work of Lonnie Holley is, for me, a work of this kind of accumulation and close attention. The delight of finding a sound and pressing it up against another found sound and another until, before a listener knows it, they are awash in a symphony of sound that feels like it stitches together as it is washing over you. Tonky is an album that takes its name from a childhood nickname that was affixed to Holley when he lived a portion of his childhood life in a honky tonk. Lonnie Holley’s life of survival and endurance is one that required – and no doubt still requires – a kind of invention. An invention that is also rich and present in Holley’s songs, which are full and immersive on Tonky, an album that begins with its longest song, a nine minute, exhaustive marathon of a tune called “Seeds,” which begins with a single sparse sound and then expands. Chants, faint keys, strings, and atop it all, Holley’s voice, not singing, but speaking plainly about working the earth when he was young, the violence he endured in the process of it all, going to bed bloodied and in pain from beatings. The song expands into a metaphor about place, about the failures of home, or anywhere meant to protect you not living up to what it sells itself to be, even if you tirelessly work at it, work on it, work to make something worthwhile of it.
“Seeds” not only sets the tone for an album that revolves around rebirth, renewal, and the limits of hope and faith, but it highlights what Holley’s greatest strength as a musician is, to me, which is a commitment to abundance, and generosity. He is an incredibly gifted storyteller with a commitment to the oral tradition, such that many listeners (myself among them,) would be entirely content sitting at the feet of a Lonnie Holley record and turning an ear to his robust, expansive storytelling. But Tonky is an album as expansive in sound as it is in making a place for a wide range of featured artists to come through the door of the record and feel at home, no matter how they spend the time they get on a song.
Mammal Hands are a trio of like-minded musicians: Nick Smart piano, Jesse Barrett drums and tabla, and Jordan Smart saxophones. Floa is their second album for Gondwana Records and in the 18 months since their debut, Animalia, they have carved out a growing following both here and abroad for their hypnotic fusion of jazz, folk and electronica: winning fans from Bonobo and Gilles Peterson to Jamie Cullum. Landmark live performances have included shows at King's Place in London and the RNCM in Manchester, as well as a barn-storming debut at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Drawing on a rich well of influences from Sufi and shamanic African trance music, Irish and Eastern European folk music, to Steve Reich and Philip Glass and more contemporary electronica influences, their music is built around deceptively simple sounding ideas that are lent power through the use of repetition and rhythmic loops. They have been compared to both Portico Quartet and GoGo Penguin for the way in which they navigate the choppy waters between contemporary dance music and jazz.
Floa (an old Norse word that means to deluge or to flow) is the sound of a more confident, experienced band: one that has grown together naturally through touring and gigging and through mammoth writing and rehearsal sessions where all three bring rhythmic, improvisational and melodic ideas to the table. Floa was recorded at Gondwana's home from home, 80 Hertz Studios in Manchester, reuniting the band with producer Matthew Halsall and features some of the Gondwana Orchestra strings who played on Halsall's acclaimed album Into Forever. Together they have crafted a wonderful sounding record, the richness of which perfectly illuminates the band's music. Artwork is from Gondwana's in-house design maestro Daniel Halsall whose artwork of symbols created from older symbols perfectly illustrates the creative ideas that drive the band's music.
Sonor Music Editions is honored to announce the reissue of the very rare LP Aquarium Sounds by Italian composer Filippo Trecca. Originally released in 1979 as a promo-only item, “Aquarium Sounds” is a hybrid collection of tracks; some were used as the soundtrack to the thriller TV series “Così Per Gioco” (1979), directed by Leonardo Cortese; others from the talk show “Acquario” (1978-1979) hosted by Italian journalist and writer Maurizio Costanzo. The album also includes “Elena Tip” which features playful vocals by a young Ilona Staller (aka Cicciolina).
Aquarium Sounds were composed by Trecca himself, Achille Oliva (bass), Alessandro Alessandroni Jr. (keys), Giancarlo de Matteis (guitars), and Marco Parisi (drums), playing together for the creation of this progressive pop gem sought after by many collectors from around the world.
The album, recorded using simple acoustic elements and early synths, is a treasure buried deep into the ocean of time that Sonor Music Editions is bringing back to the surface; a journey into the depths of our music memory as well into the universe of Italian music heritage.
Recorded in 1970 during the same period of "Overground", UNDERGROUND was recorded into 2 volumes (RT 104 and RT 16), both released in the same year in may and june at Dirmaphon studios, Roma. Together with Overground these records are really fascinating instrumental Free Jazzy/Psych Library, released with the auxiliary of historical Rai session musicians like guitarist Silvano Chimenti and organist Giorgio Carnini. This record collects all Underground' tracks in 1 LP. Established Jazz composer, Sandro Brugnolini written some among the greatest Italian soundtracks and Library music ever.
オランダ・ロッテルダムのDJ Shaun-Dによる、バブリングからダッチ・ハウスへの進化を辿るコンピレーション・アルバム『From Bubbling to Dutch House』が、〈Nyege Nyege Tapes〉よりリリース。本作には、1990年代のスピードアップされたダンスホールを基盤に、エレクトロ・ハウス、トラップ、B-More、レイヴなどを融合させた、シュリルなシンセとシンクロペーションが特徴の全10曲を収録。初期の代表曲"Pull Up"や"XXXmachine"から、未発表の新曲
Outta Control"、"Ultra Instinct"まで、DJ Shaun-Dのキャリアを網羅した内容となっています。
南アフリカ出身のDJ DadamanとMoscow Dollarによる最新作『Kagaza』が、ウガンダ版〈PAN〉な大名門〈Nyege Nyege Tapes〉から登場。本作では、バカルディ、クワイト、アマピアノ、ハウス、シンセ・ポップといった様々なジャンルやスタイルを横断した全6曲を収録。ミリタリスティックなスネア、プロト・アマピアノ／ポスト・クワイトのベースライン、ハウス風のM1ピアノ・フレーズ、曲がりくねったシンセ・シークエンスが特徴的。バントゥー語のXitsongaで歌うMoscow Dollarのヴォーカルが、タウンシップの生活を生き生きと描写していきます。南アフリカの豊かな音楽の歴史を伝えると同時に、未来を予言するようなサウンドが詰まった一枚！
UK・ウェイクフィールド出身のアーティスト、Pretty Vによる初となるフル・アルバム『Destiny of Illusion』が、昨今大人気のBianca Scoutも作品を発表していた南ロンドンの〈life is beautiful records〉よりフィジカル限定でリリース！プロデューサーaloisiusとの完全共同制作による、ローファイな質感と実験的な構成が特徴的な作品であり、ジャンルを越境するサウンドと、自己表現への強い意志が感じられる一枚。デジタル配信無しとのこと！Dean BluntやMount Kimbieのファンにもレコメンドしたい、現代UKアンダーグラウンドの注目作。
これぞ、追悼と再生の音響彫刻！故Mike Huckabyが遺したモジュラー・サウンドスケープを、cv313ことStephen Hitchellが深遠なダブ・エレクトロニクスとして再構築した作品が限定プレス。Mike Huckabyが愛用していたWaldorf Waveシンセサイザーに捧げられたトリビュート作品。ディープ・テクノの核心を静かに照らし出すような時間感覚と質感が息づいており、重力から解き放たれたような空間構築、漂うアナログの残響が美しいです！
〈Mille Plateaux〉や〈iDEAL Recordings〉にも作品を残すスウェーデンの電子音楽の名手Andreas Tilliander（TM404）と、ジャズ・トランペッターGoran Kajfešによるコラボレーション作品『In Cmin』が〈Kontra Musik〉からアナログ・リリース！TB-303のベースラインやアナログ／デジタルシンセによる音響彫刻と、Kajfešのトランペットやフルートが交錯し、月面や神話的な風景を想起させる音世界を構築。Terry Rileyの『In C』へのオマージュとして、Cマイナーでの即興演奏を展開しながら、ジャズとアンビエントの境界を越えた新たな地平を切り開いていく一枚です。
The Rising Wave marks the debut collaboration between singer-songwriter Marlene Ribeiro (of psychedelic band GNOD) and electronic producer Shackleton under the name Light-Space Modulator. The album will be released via AD 93 on the 25th April 2025.
Ribeiro’s ethereal voice—part singing, part incantation—feels both distant and intimate, humming just behind the horizon. Her experimental soundscapes flow like a streamlined river, intertwining seamlessly with Shackleton’s deep, textural production and intricate percussion. Shackleton’s percussive production ebbs and swells, conjuring a hypnotic, tripped-out atmosphere. At The Rising Wave’s core lies a sense of intention, a cleansing ritual designed to shift perception and inspire transformation.
With Ylh Bye Bye, Swiss-Moroccan producer Sami Galbi delivers a raw and electrifying debut album after the succes of his first single Dakchi Hani / Rruina. Merging North African folk, chaâbi, and trap with forward-thinking electronic club music, his punk energy and DIY ethos stem from years immersed in Lausanne’s underground squat scene, shaping a sound that’s both deeply personal and politically charged.
Driven by infectious North African melodic loops, heavy basslines, and percussive textures—blending bendir drums, karkabas, and analog synths—Ylh Bye Bye pulses with urgency. From high-energy dancefloor anthems to dreamy acid pop ballads, the album explores themes of migration, identity, and belonging. Galbi’s Arabic vocals oscillate between auto-tuned harmonies and spoken word, capturing the tensions of diaspora life.
Recorded between Switzerland and Morocco, the album’s title—meaning “Let’s go” or “See you” in regional slang—reflects the artist’s nomadic journey, from a DIY studio in a van to a transformative creative residency in Casablanca. It’s a work of constant movement, embodying both departure and return.
Following their award-winning collaboration with the father of Ethio jazz, Mulatu Astatke (Mojo magazine Top 50 of the year 2009, Sunday Times World Music Album of the year), pioneering UK collective The Heliocentrics resurface alongside another fascinating jazz enigma, ethno-musicologist, jazz maestro and multi-instrumentalist, Lloyd Miller.
Learning various instruments and immersing himself in New Orleans jazz through his father, a professional clarinet player, Lloyd Miller first trained himself in the styles of George Lewis and Jimmy Giuffre and cut his first Dixieland jazz 78 rpm record in 1950. During the late ‘50s, his father landed a job in Iran and Miller began to develop a lifelong interest in Persian and Eastern music forms, learning to play a vast array of traditional ethnic instruments from across Asia and the Middle East.
He toured Europe heavily, basing himself in Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Germany (where he played with Eddie Harris and Don Ellis) and, most famously, in Paris where he worked with oddball bandleader Jef Gilson, a phenomenon in French jazz during the early ‘60s. Miller returned to the Middle East during the ‘70s, landing his own TV show on NIRTV in Tehran under the name Kurosh Ali Khan. His show became a national fixture and ran for seven years.
Miller has since been a vocal ambassador for preserving the traditions of many forms of Eastern music. In recent years, his mid-‘60s album ‘Oriental Jazz’ has become a collector’s favourite and the UK’s Jazzman label have issued a compilation, ‘A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz’, covering work from across his career.
The renewed interest in his music has spawned this new collaboration with The Heliocentrics. Emerging from an acoustic jazz session in 2007 set up by Jazzman (and now released as the Lloyd Miller Trio EP on the same label), the new album project was recorded at The Heliocentrics’ Quatermass Studios in East London during January and February 2010, a fresh, freeform mix of Eastern arrangements, jazz and angular psychedelics. The recordings involved a number of ethnic instruments that Miller has played and studied throughout his career including the oud, Phonofiddle, Indian santur, Chinese shawm and wooden flute. Tracks include the reflective, yearning ‘Spiritual Jazz’, the cinematic ‘Electricone’ and ‘Lloyd’s Diatribe’ featuring a Miller sermon on impure music and the madness of our globalised existence.
It was so hard to get our heads around the William Onyeabor story when we first started working with him.. No one knew anything about him and that’s the way he liked it.
Now it’s 10 years later after releasing his records and what would have been William’s 79th birthday so we are releasing two of his magical lps in COLOR.
1978’s Atomic Bomb in Fission Red and 1980’s Body and Soul in Magic Ministries Blue.
You can pre-order them today on Bandcamp (it’s Bandcamp Friday), where were also throwing up some other paraphernalia, new and old.
Though we grew to love and respect Mr. Onyeabor, as we called him, we still know so little about him.
Love,
Luaka Bop
Awesome compilation of rare dub versions of Amy Winehouse songs
Tracklist :
Side A
Valerie Dub
Dubber Than Me
You Know I'm No Dub
Dub & Mr. Jones
Dub To Black
Redub
Will You Still Dub Me Tomorrow
Wake Dub Alone
Side B
Dub The Box
Love Is A Dubbing Game
You Know I'm No Dub - Take 2
Dub To Black - Take 2
Will You Still Dub Me Tomorrow - Take 2
Dub The Box - Take 2
Love Is A Dubbing Game - Take 2
You Know I'm No Dub - Take 3
Albert Ayler's 1970 album “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe” is now available on Endless Happiness! Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe" is a unique work that marks the end of Ayler's career, and as the title suggests, it is a spiritual jazz masterpiece with the grand theme that music is a cosmic healing force. While free jazz is the core of the album, Ayler's experimental spirit is on full display as he boldly introduces elements as diverse as electric guitar, blues, gospel, and poetry reading. Particularly impressive are the vocals and poetry readings of his partner, Mary Maria Parks, which give the whole piece a sense of mystical religiosity and prayer, resonating with the cosmic spiritual jazz of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders, among others. This album was released just before Ayler's death, so it can be heard as his last will and testament.
Is it noise? Jazz? Free improv? Rock 'n roll? Minimalism? Sound art? Punk? MOPCUT's third full-length is their most divergent, most genre liquefying statement yet, an album that creeps mischievously across the experimental scene at large, devouring its innovations and spitting away any lofty conceptual fat. With guest appearances from avant rap vanguard dälek, Philly poet and activist Moor Mother and esteemed turntablist and composer Mariam Rezaei, 'RYOK' oozes between various interconnected movements, constantly mutating and reanimating itself in the process. Unlike its predecessor 'JITTER', a set of 25 hyper-kinetic miniatures, 'RYOK' plays like cracked mirror image of classic album: nine dynamic, fully fleshed-out tracks that force us to question everything we think we know about structure, texture and physicality in music.
MOPCUT emerged back in 2018 as a collaboration between Taiwanese-American improv virtuoso Audrey Chen (on vocals and synth), celebrated Austrian percussionist Lukas König and idiosyncratic French guitarist Julien Desprez. Chen's visceral, electronically manipulated vocalizations - that range from guttural croaks to ear-piercing bawls - are already notorious at this stage thanks to a slew of vital solo works and diverse collaborations, while König's omnivorous approach to rhythm provides the backbone to albums like 2023's acclaimed '1 Above Minus Underground', and his collaboration with Elvin Brandhi and Peter Kutin, 'ParziFoooooooooooL'. Desprez, meanwhile, has spent decades turning a love of rock and jazz into an exploration of space and body movement, developing his own guitar technique that treats the motion of his feet on the effects pedals like a tap dance.
All of these various skills are laid out immediately on opening track 'SISMICA', when we hear Chen's stutters, wails and freeform improvised raps criss-cross with König's jerky stop-start beats and Desprez's juddering, metallic prangs. As an introduction, it works flawlessly, establishing the trio's sonic palette before they shift into fresh territory on 'WHERE TO BEGIN', forming their haphazard, chaotic noise into a bumpy beatscape for New Jersey MC dälek. Anyone who's been following dälek's output over the years will already know how comfortable he is rapping over unexpected backdrops, and his flow flawlessly marries with MOPCUT's punkish assemblage of oscillations, foley cracks and hoarse croaks. And after circling droned-out psychedelic rock on 'SEVEN ELEVEN', the trio curate an ominous, minimalist environment with 'REST TODAY', quieting their bluster for a moment to give Moor Mother's helium-voiced poetry the spotlight.
"I'm off," she squeaks. "No shadow, I'm beyond the planets." White noise hisses in the distance, while Chen's voice is reduced to a terrifying, phantasmagoric moan. This helps build the tension until MOPCUT's energy is released in under a minute on the title track, a rowdy improv-punk vignette that does exactly what it promises to. But it's the album's false ending 'Angelica' that provides the biggest surprise. A potent concoction of warbling, almost meditational drones, it's only intensified by Chen's unexpected operatic cries. It's not quite over yet, either: there's a "remix" from Mariam Rezaei that shows off her signature needle weaving technique, metamorphosing MOPCUT's live stems until they sound like industrial hardstyle, plus the 'TOPCUM REMIX', that ices the cake with a burst of instinctive machine noise.
It was quite unexpected to see the very prolific and talented Pieter Kock featuring on Macadam Mambo - which is usually used to new-comers - as he has released a lot in the past 2 years on very nice labels like RIO, Meakusma or Moonwalk X. But, the demos that he sent were so good that there was no question about doing something. And with a lot of possibilities, to prepare a double album that is now composed of 16 quality tracks for 1h20 of music… What vibes are in here! It’s heavy, loudly, loopy, mental, smokey, and always surprising. Pieter has is very own universe, and is without doubt one of the most interesting electronic musician at the moment.
Should we ask you to give chance to this opus, and tell you you won’t regret it ? We don’t think we need to do so... ☺
A long-time best-seller of the MEG-AIMP collection and long out of print, this album of sanza music recorded among the Gbaya people of the Central African Republic by ethnomusicologist Vincent Dehoux was originally released on CD in 1993. It is now being reissued on vinyl and CD to coincide with the exhibition Afrosonica - Soundscapes. It features a selection of 'songs for thought': an intimate repertoire conducive to introspection, accompanied by the repetitive, meditative sound of lamellaphones.
Artwork by Nicola Tirabasso and Alison Fielding
Thanks to Jack Colleran, Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher Mc Donald, Margie Jean Lewis, Róisin Berkley, Luka Seifert, Diego Herrera, and Olan Monk
Recorded in Conamara and Dublin between 2021 and 2023.