NEW ARRIVALS

"Crashing on American shores in a gothic fit of FauxAD melancholy, ethereal wave was the scene that celebrated its own stillbirth. Among the genre’s pinnacle works is Elysium’s lone album Glisten, which arrived on compact disc under the Dewdrops Records banner in 1995. Come for the lush and atmospheric cooings of Jenny Adams, stay for the clean-tone precision of Rodney Rodriguez. Is this heaven or Los Angeles?"

Among the most influential hip-hop artists to emerge in the rapid creative expansion of the early 1990s, Queens duo Organized Konfusion helped reshape rap's aesthetic horizons with the 1991 release of a groundbreaking self-titled album. A dizzying display of lyrical dexterity and forward-thinking production, Organized Konfusion helped lay the foundation for what would become underground hip-hop, with intricate wordplay and cerebral rhyme structures. Both Pharoahe Monch and Prince Po shine throughout the album, revealing the immense talent that would later establish Monch as one of hip-hop's most revered voices and spark Po's collaborations with producers like Danger Mouse, Madlib, Large Professor, Oh No, and more. From playful nostalgia to sharp social commentary to surreal linguistic explorations, the duo navigates chaotic drum breaks with dense rhyme patterns, vivid imagery, and ever-shifting narratives. After decades of limited availability and unofficial bootlegs, this is the first official vinyl reissue of Organized Konfusion since its 1991 release. Featuring three rare bonus tracks, this 35th anniversary edition is available on 2LP and CD, giving a long overdue spotlight to one of hip-hop's most important albums.

Commissioned and produced by 180 Studios, Ryoji Ikeda’s site-specific audio- visual installation data-cosm [n°1] is a unique immersive experience charting the full spectrum of data on nature – from the microscopic scale of particle physics to the macroscopic of astrophysics, as was previously evident in the artist’s data-verse project.Premiered at 180 Studios in October 2025, data-cosm [n°1] functions as a giant microscope, a scientific apparatus, a clinical device, a monitoring system, and a window to an infinitely vast space. Visitors are invited to lie down on the floor and look up at the large LED screen set on the ceiling above them, their bodies surrounded by Ikeda’s soundscapes – a total sensory experience.

Ryoji Ikeda, Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media.

He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.

Eklekto Eklekto is a contemporary percussion collective founded in 1974 in Geneva. Constantly seeking to reinvent percussion music, the group collaborates with living composers and contemporary artists through concerts, multimedia projects and artistic events that question the listener’s expectations towards new musical forms.

Eklekto has premiered over 100 new works and performed hundreds of internationally acclaimed shows.

'The Will of Tongues' is the new studio album by Sarah Davachi, and it is certainly her most ambitious to date, spanning over two hours of music across three LPs. The album features five new solo compositions for historical pipe organs (recorded across the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands), a suite of three choral pieces, a collection of “interludes” for various microtonal ensembles (strings, brass, woodwinds), and a longform chamber piece for string trio, organ, and tape. The latter two pieces were commissions from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, while the choral work was commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland.

In addition to Davachi performing on organ throughout, 'The Will of Tongues' also features an incredible group of musicians and ensembles from across the USA and Europe, including Whitney Johnson (viola), Eyvind Kang (viola), Lucy Railton (cello), Diapason (an experimental/microtonal brass ensemble based in Los Angeles, consisting of Nev Wendell, Nicholas Ginsburg, Mattie Barbier, and Mason Moy), Phaedrus (a Renaissance flute consort based in Switzerland, consisting of Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, and Luis Martinez Pueyo), and Chamber Choir Ireland (conducted by Nils Schweckendiek).

'The Will of Tongues' engages the numerous compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade especially – including iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure, all rooted in the minimalist tradition from which she operates – but with a more pointed and intentional touch than in previous forms. Across its thirteen tracks, ideas hocket from one ensemble or instrument to the next, slowly shifting in balance over the course of what is unmistakably a demanding length.

As a combined body of work, however, the music on this album seeks to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening, and for the awareness that such listening can serve as a kind of imaginative negative space; one that critically promotes confrontation and creation rather than escape. This collection of music is not easy listening, and it’s not meant to be – when long durations and a reduction of materials are at play, the ear and the mind are forced to truly face the reality of sound itself and the significant mental spaces that it continually gives rise to, which can carry deep wells of meaning if the listener is willing to journey there. 'The Will of Tongues' is thus a celebration of iterative listening and of extreme engagement, of intimate aural experience and its vast psychic horizons.

Nothing expresses us beyond death, and I sometimes cried out: “that is how the will of tongues is made!”

'The Will of Tongues' is the new studio album by Sarah Davachi, and it is certainly her most ambitious to date, spanning over two hours of music across three LPs. The album features five new solo compositions for historical pipe organs (recorded across the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands), a suite of three choral pieces, a collection of “interludes” for various microtonal ensembles (strings, brass, woodwinds), and a longform chamber piece for string trio, organ, and tape. The latter two pieces were commissions from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, while the choral work was commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland.

In addition to Davachi performing on organ throughout, 'The Will of Tongues' also features an incredible group of musicians and ensembles from across the USA and Europe, including Whitney Johnson (viola), Eyvind Kang (viola), Lucy Railton (cello), Diapason (an experimental/microtonal brass ensemble based in Los Angeles, consisting of Nev Wendell, Nicholas Ginsburg, Mattie Barbier, and Mason Moy), Phaedrus (a Renaissance flute consort based in Switzerland, consisting of Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, and Luis Martinez Pueyo), and Chamber Choir Ireland (conducted by Nils Schweckendiek).

'The Will of Tongues' engages the numerous compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade especially – including iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure, all rooted in the minimalist tradition from which she operates – but with a more pointed and intentional touch than in previous forms. Across its thirteen tracks, ideas hocket from one ensemble or instrument to the next, slowly shifting in balance over the course of what is unmistakably a demanding length.

As a combined body of work, however, the music on this album seeks to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening, and for the awareness that such listening can serve as a kind of imaginative negative space; one that critically promotes confrontation and creation rather than escape. This collection of music is not easy listening, and it’s not meant to be – when long durations and a reduction of materials are at play, the ear and the mind are forced to truly face the reality of sound itself and the significant mental spaces that it continually gives rise to, which can carry deep wells of meaning if the listener is willing to journey there. 'The Will of Tongues' is thus a celebration of iterative listening and of extreme engagement, of intimate aural experience and its vast psychic horizons.

Nothing expresses us beyond death, and I sometimes cried out: “that is how the will of tongues is made!”

"Sounds resonating from the sky-bound sanctuary of the Northern Alps’ deepest reaches. A deeply immersive work of ambient and electronica, woven through Hiroshi Watanabe’s dialogue with the vast natural environment of Kumonodaira." Situated at an altitude of 2,600 meters in the Northern Alps, Kumonodaira is widely celebrated as one of Japan’s most secluded and untouched regions. Invited to the Artist-in-Residence program hosted by Kumonodaira Mountain Hut, Hiroshi Watanabe, also known internationally as KAITO, immersed himself in this majestic landscape to create his latest album, 'Among the Clouds'. An endless sea of clouds, rapidly shifting skies, and the subtle movements of wind and water against rugged mountain faces — the days spent traversing the peaks deepened his awareness of the delicate textures and ever-changing rhythms of the landscape. The inspirations gathered during these journeys, combined with field recordings captured on site, blend seamlessly with Watanabe’s signature expansive melodies and atmospheric soundscapes. While rooted in electronic music, the album possesses an organic vitality that makes it feel as though the mountains themselves are breathing. Painting the ever-changing alpine panorama through sound, Among the Clouds is a deeply emotional and immersive work that invites listeners into a serene journey through sound, space, and perception. The front and back cover photography was also captured by Hiroshi Watanabe himself, offering a visual window into the landscapes and atmospheres that shaped the music.

Japan’s electroacoustic vanguard reconvene for their second album proper, once again shining light on previously unoccupied space somewhere between Arthur Russell and Autechre. It’s supremely moody, impossibly innovative business, folding Yuki Nakagawa's no-wave'd cello vamps into Koshiro Hino (aka YPY)'s brittle electroid syncopations, absolutely essential listening if you’re into SND, Pan Sonic, DNA, Suicide.'KAK' - what a title - is the next stage of KAKUHAN’s evolution, seemingly self-titled but hiding plenty of clues if you understand Japanese. "KAK" can evoke a number of different characteristics: edge or angularity, core, expansion, agitation or absence. The duo meditate and refract these guiding principles over nine tracks (and a bonus digital addendum) with their usual focus on the interplay between man and machine - something Hino's been exploring for many years with both his solo work as YPY, and with his pioneering band, goat (JP). Working with electronics (drum machines, samplers, oscillators) Hino infuses weightless rhythms with rare fluidity, as if tracing an algorithm trained on Milford Graves. His rubbery, bio-mechanical outbursts are formed into jagged, continuum-confusing trajectories - prismatic spaces where grime intersects footwork and jersey club, and drill corkscrews thru gagaku and Americana.Yuki Nakagawa's emphatic improvisations are just as mind-altering. While he holds back at first, accenting Hino's rapid-fire sequences with hollow, resonant scrapes and junked Downtown distortions, he eventually edges further towards centre stage. Featherlight cello squeals are elongated, imagining a decelerated hoedown, angling folk-y, ecstatic shapes while Hino responds with drum machine prangs. Soon, the duo skewer nervy baroque ornamentation with clockwork whirrs that trip over themselves, the insectoid rhythmic fractals gradually scuttling around a droning cello. By the end of the album, the duo have somehow completely switched roles; Hino's grey boxes now sounding as if they've been excavated from ancient ground, while Nakagawa's strings throb with cybernetic energy, beamed in from a far dimension.

This is the debut album as bandleader by Ryo Kawasaki, a jazz and fusion guitarist whose talent was recognized by Gil Evans and who has made a name for himself internationally. The album showcases a cool, cosmic sound, featuring tracks such as “Agana,” which features breathtaking guitar playing set against a backdrop of fast-paced percussion, and “Phil,” a dazzling jazz-funk number.

One of the finest vocal groups of the rocksteady and early reggae periods of Jamaican music, the Heptones first drew attention for the singles and albums they cut for Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One label during the late '60s. Poised on the cusp of a cultural shift, Leroy Sibbles (also a bass-wielding session man for Dodd) and partners Barry Llewellyn and Earl Morgan tackled a combination of the sort of pained love songs then in vogue and fresher "reality" material, a mix arguably heard best on On Top.

Originally released in 1980. "Hailing from the late seventies through 1980 originally, this has a state of the art Blackbeard mix from Dennis Bovell, production of the Well Pack Band from Winston Edwards and stands as a convincing album -- which goes some way to explain the advanced popularity entire dub sets went on to experience after punk's early love affair with sufferer's reggae. The vibes here are good, the titles great and while some of the themes may not be entirely dread, the playing is all high caliber and the one-drop dubs are very well crafted."

Joe Gibbs' 1979 album Majestic Dub stands as a unique and innovative take on the sound of Dub. The album opens with "Ten Commandments," an energetic track featuring prominent use of synthesizers, blending early techno influences with dub rhythms. This departure from the typical sound showcases Gibbs' ambition to modernize reggae without overusing electronic elements. The title track, "Majestic Dub," highlights the rhythmic prowess of the legendary Sly and Robbie, grounding the music with a strong reggae foundation while also experimenting with electronic drums, further pushing the sonic boundaries. As the album progresses, tracks like "Social Justice" and "Kings of Dub" continue to explore new textures. "Social Justice" introduces a synthesizer subtly woven into the rhythm, enhancing the track's depth and layering. In contrast, "Kings of Dub" feels lighter and more traditionally reggae, its smooth rhythms and precise production feel more grounded. These tracks exemplify Gibbs' ability to balance innovation with respect for reggae’s roots, allowing a variety of influences and styles to shine through without overwhelming the core dub essence. The album concludes with powerful tracks like "Edward the Eighth" and "Embargo," which return to more orthodox dub sounds while incorporating dynamic effects such as echo and delay. These final songs capture the essence of Majestic Dub, where traditional reggae rhythms meet modern production techniques. Gibbs' collaboration with top-tier musicians, including Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, and Tommy McCook, adds further depth to an already rich soundscape. Altogether, Majestic Dub serves as a bold, forward-thinking album that not only honors the roots of dub but also pushes it into exciting new territory.

Originally released in 1977 and expanded for a 1995 edition by Musica Elettronica Viva founder member Allan Bryant, 'Space Guitars' uses no electronics, Bryant instead prepares and plays his modified instruments to remodel the sound into unclassifiable waves, clusters of bleeps and insectoid chirps. Bryant wasn't averse to electronic music - he started an influential electronic improv act with Alvin Curran, after all - but he didn't want to rely on synths to make "fascinating new and completely different sounds." And 'Space Guitars' collects studies he made specifically for guitar, whether it immediately sounds like it or not. The title track alone is mindbogglingly unique, making Derek Bailey and Fred Frith's prepared jammers sound almost pedestrian in comparison. We're not completely sure what Bryant is doing, but using only amplification and his arsenal of instruments, he creates sounds with as much variance and texture as a room filled with synthesizers, constantly modifying the pitch and any identifying sonic markers to prevent us from hearing anything that might be too straightforward. It's hard to believe 'Bouncing People Planet' isn't firing from a rack of modules; the way Bryant stacks his ping-ponging string sounds is undoubtedly inspired by synth methodologies and the sound itself is confounding, dense and rhythmic in ways you struggle to comprehend. Best of all though is 'Space Train', where Bryant makes his guitar sound like one of Alan Lamb's legendary aeolian harps, stretching its strings to make it mimic train wheels moving across miles of track.

Originally released in 1977 and expanded for a 1995 edition by Musica Elettronica Viva founder member Allan Bryant, 'Space Guitars' uses no electronics, Bryant instead prepares and plays his modified instruments to remodel the sound into unclassifiable waves, clusters of bleeps and insectoid chirps. Bryant wasn't averse to electronic music - he started an influential electronic improv act with Alvin Curran, after all - but he didn't want to rely on synths to make "fascinating new and completely different sounds." And 'Space Guitars' collects studies he made specifically for guitar, whether it immediately sounds like it or not. The title track alone is mindbogglingly unique, making Derek Bailey and Fred Frith's prepared jammers sound almost pedestrian in comparison. We're not completely sure what Bryant is doing, but using only amplification and his arsenal of instruments, he creates sounds with as much variance and texture as a room filled with synthesizers, constantly modifying the pitch and any identifying sonic markers to prevent us from hearing anything that might be too straightforward. It's hard to believe 'Bouncing People Planet' isn't firing from a rack of modules; the way Bryant stacks his ping-ponging string sounds is undoubtedly inspired by synth methodologies and the sound itself is confounding, dense and rhythmic in ways you struggle to comprehend. Best of all though is 'Space Train', where Bryant makes his guitar sound like one of Alan Lamb's legendary aeolian harps, stretching its strings to make it mimic train wheels moving across miles of track.

From hollowed-out corridors and whispering tunnels, through soundsystem pressure in darkened rooms illuminated by a single intermittent light, Long Gone's fifth release traces the contours of Miles J Paralysis' mind. Dub elements drift through the fog of post-punk disintegration, while echoing percussion and solemn vocals emerge and recede like distant signals. Heavy with bassweight and foreboding, yet never collapsing under its own density, the record occupies that rare space where dread, depth and breathing room coexist.

Lost Soul Super Rarity “Here I Am Baby” by Lady Jane reissued by Athens of the North Rare 1980 Detroit funk-soul LP finally surfaces after 45 years, revealing a powerful story of survival and artistic resilience Edinburgh based label Athens of the North is pleased to announce the reissue of Here I Am Baby, the only studio album by soul and funk vocalist Lady Jane (Jane Brice), originally recorded at Studio A, in Dearborn Heights and privately released in 1980. Lady Jane recorded these sessions during a turbulent period in Detroit in the late 1970s, working with respected engineer Eric Morgeson and a studio band on material largely written by her then-husband. The album remained virtually unknown for decades, with copies destroyed in a flood and masters held by her ex-husband. A chance discovery by Friends of Sound Records founder David Haffner in 2022 set the reissue in motion. Remarkably, before his death, Jane’s ex-husband returned the original master tapes to her—yielding not only the complete multitracks for Here I Am Baby, but an entire album’s worth of unreleased material, also coming soon on AOTN. Here I Am Baby showcases Jane’s extraordinary voice across a compelling blend of soul, funk, and disco, from the opening ballad through heavy funk excursions like “Never Lived In The Ghetto” and “Space Flight.” The album’s final track, “She’s A Star” - the only song Janewrote herself - carries profound personal significance. Recorded without her husband’s knowledge, the song directly addresses her survival of childhood sexual abuse and stands as a moving testament to resilience and self-belief. Now an ordained minister, Jane Brice has spent decades away from the spotlight. But her voice—at once forceful, delicate, and vulnerable—deserves to be heard. Newly mastered from the recovered tapes, Here I Am Baby and the forthcoming Miss Disco present not merely a rare funk-soul artifact, but a powerful document of a woman’s courage in reclaiming her own story.

Spiritual Jazz 19 - West Coast USA Part 1: 50s & 60s examines the influence and expression of the underground jazz that evolved in California and surrounding states during the latter part of the 20th century. "The West Coast of the USA has long been associated with the ‘cool jazz’ popular explosion of the 1950s, though wherever jazz was played, modal, Afro-centric and spiritualised streams flowed and flourished too - the West Coast was no exception. In the post-war years, Los Angeles’ Central Avenue was second only to Manhattan as America’s greatest jazz district. Yet while Manhattan might have been the de facto centre of the jazz universe during these years, it was California that came to exert the greater pull on culture at large, drawing people from across America toward its burgeoning 1960s counter-culture. Here we explore the effects of that counter-culture on jazz. We examine the influence of the most significant force in post-civil rights Black politics – the Black Panthers, and we delve into the novel spiritual practices and religions of the coming ‘New Age’. A variety of idiosyncratic indies such as Arhoolie, Theresa and Nimbus were located in California as well as many more private enterprises, and we showcase the results of their efforts to express their musical freedom. All of these factors can be seen to have an influence on the way that jazz and jazz musicians developed and thrived on the West Coast - and the evolution of spiritual jazz here is examined in detail."

Spiritual Jazz 19 - West Coast USA Part 1: 50s & 60s examines the influence and expression of the underground jazz that evolved in California and surrounding states during the latter part of the 20th century. "The West Coast of the USA has long been associated with the ‘cool jazz’ popular explosion of the 1950s, though wherever jazz was played, modal, Afro-centric and spiritualised streams flowed and flourished too - the West Coast was no exception. In the post-war years, Los Angeles’ Central Avenue was second only to Manhattan as America’s greatest jazz district. Yet while Manhattan might have been the de facto centre of the jazz universe during these years, it was California that came to exert the greater pull on culture at large, drawing people from across America toward its burgeoning 1960s counter-culture. Here we explore the effects of that counter-culture on jazz. We examine the influence of the most significant force in post-civil rights Black politics – the Black Panthers, and we delve into the novel spiritual practices and religions of the coming ‘New Age’. A variety of idiosyncratic indies such as Arhoolie, Theresa and Nimbus were located in California as well as many more private enterprises, and we showcase the results of their efforts to express their musical freedom. All of these factors can be seen to have an influence on the way that jazz and jazz musicians developed and thrived on the West Coast - and the evolution of spiritual jazz here is examined in detail."

大人気シリーズの第19弾として、20世紀後半の米西海岸におけるアンダーグラウンド・ジャズの真像に迫る2部作の完結編『Spiritual Jazz 19 - West Coast USA Part 2: 70s & 80s』。公民権運動後の黒人政治思想やニューエイジ的な精神的探求が最高潮に達した時代を背景に、〈Arhoolie〉や〈Theresa〉〈Nimbus〉といった自主レーベル群に残された密度の高い音源を凝縮。深遠なアフロ・ベースの地鳴りや開放的なモーダル旋律、エレクトリックな質感も交えた多角的なアンサンブルが熱い祈りのように響き渡り、圧倒的な表現の自由を感じさせる。50年代の「クール・ジャズ」というステレオタイプを完全に塗り替えた前作に続き、70〜80年代のカリフォルニアでさらなる深化を遂げたスピリチュアル・ジャズの黄金期を解き明かす充実のコンピレーション。

Deluxe edition, housed in a reverse board printed sleeve with printed inner sleeve. Three LPs came out on Jihad, the label Amiri Baraka ran out of his own house in Newark. Two of them - Sonny's Time Now and A Black Mass - entered the canon of the New Thing decades ago. The third stayed a rumour: a title traded between collectors, a track a radio DJ might drop once a year, a record far more people had heard about than heard. Original copies surface rarely and sell for three figures. Black and Beautiful... Soul and Madness is back, on vinyl for the first time since 1968. Baraka - still signing as LeRoi Jones - had returned to Newark after the Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School collapsed, and built Spirit House on Stirling Street with his wife Amina: part theatre, part meeting hall, part studio. This is where the album was cut, months after the city had burned in the summer of 1967. Jihad existed to put that work on record. The people making it thought of themselves, in Baraka's phrase, as cultural workers. The music is warmer and odder than the reputation suggests. The Jihad Singers - Freddie Johnson out front, Yusef Iman holding the bottom, Aireen Eternal, Leonard Cathcart and Gilbert Monk filling the middle - sing street-corner harmony that owes everything to Motown and to the doo-wop groups of a decade earlier. Beautiful Black Women was built on the frame of Smokey Robinson's Ooo Baby Baby. Underneath, congas and Russell Lyle's alto and flute keep the arrangements loose, closer to a rehearsal room than a session date. And over it, through it, sometimes against it, Baraka declaims - flat, insistent, pushing ahead of the beat in a cadence that would not be named for another fifteen years. That is the thing worth holding onto. This came out two years before the first Last Poets album, two before the Watts Prophets, two before Gil Scott-Heron walked into a studio. The form barely existed and here it is, fully assembled, on a record pressed by a poet for a Newark community centre. The politics are unbrokered and the rhetoric is of 1968, not of now - Baraka himself spent the rest of his life arguing with the man who made it. It remains a document with the temperature of the moment still in it. Reissued by Moved By Sound, a label that leaves copyright and publishing with artists and their families and takes only its share of the vinyl. That principle is why this took as long as it did: after a protracted rights situation the record is finally in production. Worth the wait. Recommended. "Calling all black people calling all black people, man woman child Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in Black people, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling you, calling all black people calling all black people, come in, black people, come on in." - Amiri Baraka

Guess-again specialists Death Is Not The End reissue Earle Brown’s 1974 solo debut of otherworldly concrète, notably featuring piano by live electronics pioneer and Cage foil, David Tudor, contributing to its uncanny magnetic tape soundscapes. ‘Music by Earle Brown’ features compositions written 1952-1963 during the years after its maker moved to New York to be closer to kindred spirits Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, whom he met years prior when they performed in Denver where he was teaching the Schillinger technique of composition. In New York, his style of open form composition would influence Cage’s own developments guided by indeterminacy, which in turn exposed Brown’s music to Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, and whch led him to work with Morton Feldman, as heard on their 1962 split side - Brown’s first recording credit, for Time Records. The four works speak to the pivotal emergence of new music during that era. In chronological order, ’November 1952’ features a stop/start angularity, shards of keys and persuasive detonations precisely performed by David Tudor, gripping in its embrace of negative space, contrasting with the fractious concrète cut-up tones of ‘Octet I’, a 1953 piece composed and executed entirely by Brown and comparable as much with Stockhausen’s early electronics as the oddities emerging from Pierre Henry’s studio around that same time. Forward ten years to the album’s long-form bookends, where he conducts an acoustic octet in the fever dream-like play of dissonance and queered pitches on ‘Novara’ (1962), and conducts many of the same performers, and joins them on magnetic tape, for ‘Times Five’ (1963), a fascinating electro-acoustic whorl of rich colours and icicle rhythms that slips off the page into sustained, pitch bent notes with an effect that must have felt radical at the time, and still represents the curiosity and freedoms of the New York School of composers.

DINTE present a cassette-only issue of an NTS radio broadcast from back in early 2019. "A cross-continental trip through instrumental surf, short-run garage rock, and space-age psych oddities from across the globe, incl. groups from the US, UK, Peru, Angola, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, India & Singapore among others."

Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.

Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.