NEW ARRIVALS

With Réminiscences (2017–2019), Jean-Claude Éloy embarks on an ambitious journey through memory, transformation, and pure listening. This vast electroacoustic cycle—comprising Incantation, Confrontation, Contemplation, and Oppression-Libération—draws deeply from the sound world of his seminal work Yo-In. Éloy recycles and reworks electroacoustic materials originally created at the Institute of Sonology (Utrecht, 1979/1980) and incorporates an extraordinary archive of percussion samples recorded at his request by Japanese percussionist Sumire Yoshihara at NHK’s Electronic Music Studio in Tokyo, as well as contributions from Gaston Sylvestre and Michael Ranta. Unlike the original 1980 version—conceived as a sound theater for an imaginary ritual and realized with the participation of Michael W. Ranta—Réminiscences is conceived as a purely electroacoustic experience, liberated from the constraints of live performance. Éloy focuses on the most distinctive sources: boat sirens, natural phenomena (volcanoes, wind, rain, waves), African bird calls, industrial noises, and a wide palette of metallic, wooden, and skin percussion. The result is a celebration of sound itself—an acoustic ritual where each work explores a specific theme through the metamorphosis of its materials. Éloy’s intent is to draw the listener into a heightened state of auditory perception, encouraging a deep concentration on the sonic phenomena at the heart of the music. Réminiscences stands as a testament to his lifelong exploration of the power of listening and the transformative potential of electroacoustic art. Produced at Studio Eve-Défense, the composer’s home studio, and presented in a 5-panel digipak with a 24-page booklet, this release is both a culmination and a renewal of Éloy’s creative universe.

Superb, revered version-excursion in the grand tradition of Tempo Explosion. Willie Williams kicks off imperiously, on a classic Rhythm & Sound rhythm adroitly evoking Niney’s way with horns. Sugar and Tikkiman take a turn, besides Berlin faces like Cotton and Rod Of Iron. No one puts a foot wrong. More than twenty years ago now, this LP was cut ‘hot’, for maximum dynamic range, and deadly bass. With all copies since then derived from the same cut, many turntable set-ups may experience slight skipping at moments, especially during side 2. In addition, there are very occasional, scattered pops and crackles; for vinyl lovers nothing out-of-the-ordinary.

Subtitled: Primordial Vibration / Sound ceremonial with a contemplative character. Composed in 1983-1986. Sound ceremonial with a contemplative character for two voices of Japanese Buddhist monks (traditional Shômyô techniques - traditional temple chanting - in a larger, modern and creative form), three Japanese Gagaku instrumentalists (traditional court music in a modern and creative form), one percussionist (with a percussion instrument orchestra) and electro-acoustic (fixed interactive sounds). Electronic studio of the Sweelinck Conservatorium, Amsterdam (1984-86). With Ebihara Kôshin (Tendai sect): solo voice, Arai Kôjun (Shingon sect): solo voice, Yaotani Satoru: Ô-Hichiriki solo, Shiba Sukeyasu : solo Ryûteki, Miyata Mayumi: Shô solo, Ô-Shô, Alto-Sheng, Michael Ranta : solo percussions, Jean-Claude Eloy, electro-acoustic (sound projection, general coordination, mixing). Studio recording made during the Donaueschingen festival 1990 (Donaueschinger Musiktage) by the SWF (Südwestfunk), Baden-Baden. First World publication. Presented in a small box of 3 x CDs with 60 pages booklet.

First world publication for the seminal Yo-In (1980) an electro-acoustic work produced in Japan and revisited by the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1981. “Sound Theater for an imaginary rite”. Yo-Inleads to a sort of “celebration-ritualization of the day of man on Earth”. Jean-Claude Eloy discovered the meaning of Yo-In by going deeper into the culture of Japan where he had been invited by Toru Takemitsu in 1970: “Yo-In, echo, rhyme, resonance, psychic reverberation”. Karheinz Stockhausen quickly valued Jean-Claude Eloy and has always supported him. Close universes, long-term works. Four acts for Reverberations “in an unusual context". Performed by Michael Ranta (solo percussionist) and Jean-Claude Eloy (electroacoustic projection, synchronisation, mixings). Recorded during a public concert given at the Warsaw Autumn festival Polish-Radio, Warsaw, September, 1994 "I look at my watch for the first time: it has been four hours since I entered the sanctuary and I have not left my seat. Actually, nowadays few musical pieces are capable of keeping the audience awake that long. 'Yo-In' does not just capture our attention through a mere act of hypnosis, through the spellbinding magic of sounds or through some hovering dizziness [...] 'Yo-In' is not born from a land of oblivion but from the realm of consciousness. Here, once time has been stretched by the long, evolving scores, one becomes much more accessible and open, extremely receptive to the many specific and complex events that follow one another, overlap, intermingle and combine with one another in a wonderfully mastered development. […]" J.C. Eloy Deluxe edition, 4xCD + 160pp book in english

True to form, Andrea Borghi works directly with VHS tapes and the apparatus that plays them, manipulating the exposed mechanisms with the care and curiosity of a dedicated scientist. Drawing from these manual manipulations, Borghi's experiments combine mechanical sounds with mangled tape samples to inspire a mechanised nostalgia inseparably hybridised with human trace. Unlike others who work with old film, he resists the eerie to focus on the intricate crunch and buzz, an electro-acoustic soundscape tangentially related to the field recordings. By highlighting the precise moment that recorded media becomes perceived, a restless, shifting mass of both familiar and unrecognisable sounds results in a unique form of otic chiaroscuro. The result is a complication of inside and outside sounds: distant, gesturing snippets of semi-remembered, half-imagined films compete with TV cathode burn, tracking stutters, mechanical interference, and vérité whirrs and clicks that could only come from that original reproducer of dreams, the VHS player. With Palsecam Borghi gives dignity to an often maligned format, in an engaging mélange that represents the recovery of an object discarded as an objet d'art. Composed & recorded by Andrea Borghi. VHS recorder, contact microphones, computer. APO 17 | Published by Aposiopèse. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cut By Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin Andrea Borghi (1974 Pietrasanta, Lucca) is a sound artist and electro-acoustic composer. His work focuses on the relationship between sound and matter. His practice is based on oriented and multidisciplinary research processes, and includes sculptural objects, installations, obsolete media and electronics. In the series named “Discomateria” he resorts to the use of glass, resin, metal and, more recently, marble as primary substrate for the production of sounds with a growing body of graphic/sculptural works. Tactility is something he has been exploring in his music over the course of his entire career, creating organic auditory experiences for the listeners.

Thank you : floors, walls, ceilings, corridors, chairs, tables, air-conditioners, heaters, alarms, plastic, paper, foil, tins, boxes, containers, microphones, speakers, shellac, tape, magnets, dust, data, hollows, surfaces, bodies, actions, weather, vibration, Jennifer Callaway, Carly Fischer, Eric la Casa, David Prescott-steed, Martin Kay, Matthew Davis, Francisco Meirino, Justas Pipinis, Ursss, everyone from C3, Simon Whetham, Edwina Eves, Yvan Etienne, Chisato Ishiyama, Pierre Judon, Aposiopèse. Eamon Sprod (previously working as Tarab) works with sound collected from mundane or neglected urban spaces, pursuing an anti-naturalist field recording practice to draw oblique narratives and listening spaces from the everyday and its outer edges. Rather than describing spaces, he attempts to shape them, by working to include everyday spaces as active participants in aural experiences instead of only acting as their container.

During a 2016 trip to Colombia, I was very fortunate to be welcomed by the staff of the Rio Claro Natural Reserve, located in the central Cordillera. After several days of recording in the caves—the ones open to the public—inhabited by small colonies of cave-dwelling Guacharos (Steatornis caripensis), Juan Guillermo Garcés, director and founder of the Rio Claro sanctuary, allowed me to access a secret location outside of the reserve, home to what ornithologists reckon is one of the largest known colonies of these birds in Colombia. The only species of its kind, the Cave Guacharos (also known as Oilbird), is a gregarious, cave-dwelling animal that has developed the rare echolocation abilities usually found in cetaceans, bats and, more rarely, mammals. While the vast majority of echolocation signals known to exist in the animal world operate in a spectrum that is inaudible to humans, the signals emitted by Guacharos occur in the medium/high range of our auditory spectrum. Although Alexander Von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland reported the existence of these animals to Europe in 1799, and Von Humboldt described them between 1814 and 1817, their nesting sites were already well known to indigenous populations, who saw them as the seat of evil spirits. Traditionally used by these peoples for their meat and cooking oil, the Guacharos were largely decimated by the colonial presence in the area, then hunted until the 1960s before being listed as a protected species in the 1970s.

Mala Fama is a Kichwa sound artist from Ibarra, Ecuador. His work is a testament to inhabiting—and creating—multiple worlds at once, while being rooted in Indigenous pride and power. Jichushka is a Kichwa word translating to “Lonely/Abandoned,” marking grief as a pathway to liberation. The 11-track album features the cultural specificities of northern Ecuador's Indigenous communities while also traversing boundless electronic experimentation, and was mastered by Nicola Cruz. Lead single "Mortaja II" is a retextured adaptation of Kichwa funeral music, accompanied by a music video (release date October 21st) that reflects the track’s sacred circularity through movement and land-based ritual. The video was shot in Ibarra, Ecuador by directors Rony Albuja and Hilda Males. Mala Fama wrote and recorded the album between 2016-2022, through ongoing home studio sessions that facilitated close collaboration with a network of artists of musical lineages from the Andean region such as marimba, vallenato, and cumbia– including Afro-Ecuadorian group Duo Anjoa, vocalist Catalina Ortiz hailing from coastal Esmeraldas, Ibarra-based multi-instrumentalist Luis Lema, and Quixosis, a leader of Quito’s underground vanguard. The majority of Jichushka was composed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting a complete revision of a previously-written album to mirror unexpected shifts, and new beginnings. The album is world-making through peaceful, ambient compositions as much as heavy sequencing, inviting melancholic remembrances of times and spaces that no longer exist, but that make way for creation.

Most of us can agree that music is not a competition. However, the National Championship for Norwegian Folk Music and Dance (Landskappleiken) has been an important annual event since it´s inception in 1896. In 2025, the jury deemed Helga Myhr to be Norway’s finest Hardanger fiddle player, after performing tunes from her native valley Hallingdal. Since she released her solo debut “Natten veller seg ut” in 2019, Myhr has established herself as a flexible musician; at home in contemporary and improvised settings (Dei Kjenslevare, duo with Tanja Orning or in collaboration with Mats Gustafsson), as well as in a myriad of different expressions rooted in various Norwegian traditions. “Slåttespel” offers the first possibility of hearing Myhr exclusively playing traditional tunes from Hallingdal; the music she grew up playing, and that she has been working with for all her musical life.

Egyptian oud player and composer Aly Eissa has become a key figure in Cairo’s experimental music scene, performing solo and as part of The Handover. Mentored by composer Abdo Dagher and oud master Hazem Shahin, Eissa draws on Egyptian classical and folk traditions for ‘Eggshells’. The expansive title piece occupies much of the album and features Eissa alone on oud, before moving into ‘Sukr At-taganni’, where his playing accompanies a recitation of poetry by thirteenth-century Arab poet Baha’ al-Din Zuhayr. Virtuosic, intricate and remarkably intimate.

Roping in Pierre Bastien and Mark Cunningham to provide brass, Mike Cooper turns in his most kaleidoscopic fourth world dream sequence to date, drawing on dub and exotica to harmonise with Andrew Pekler's marooned soundscapes... Cooper admits in the liner notes that although he's often compared with Jon Hassell, it's German painter Mati Klarwein fantastical album covers that always reminded him exactly why he was doing what he was doing. Because Cooper makes music for imaginary places, not tangible soundtracks but half dreamed, half lived experiences that course through his catalog of experiments. And his process has never been quite so vivid as it is on 'Stochastic Parrot', a suite of vertiginous reverberations that are struck through with Cooper's "real and virtual" lap steel twangs, collaged together from samples and field recordings that wobble like heat haze. Different pockets of rhythm bash into each other on 'ARCHAEOPTERYX', accompanied by Bastien and Cunningham's spiraling brass improvisations. And Cooper holds the sounds together with his lulling repeated phrases; the hand drums might sound as if they're in conflict with the cycling drum machine crashes, but that's the point - it's not like channeling a dream so much as it's like being subjected to three or four dreams simultaneously. It's the ghosts of jazz fusion being raked over coals at midnight: just tune into 'SUMATRA SAMPHIRE', with its distant animalistic wails and popcorn drums, or the granulized 'HAT YAI', that sounds like the prelude to a druggy ritual.

"Shaking off the uneasy depths of Lapsed Gasps took a minute (those mix sessions were intense!). Oliver and I knew we’d like the record that followed to let in some light. Not much light, but enough to differently illuminate the darkened corners Push For Night prefers to inhabit. So we shifted the stone slab covering the conceptual entrance to the sarcophagal room that contains the idea of PFN, just a little, and the crepuscular light inside the room changed. The shadows behaved differently, sounded differently. The textures, sizes, shapes, and acoustics of our weird space altered. How can we interpret the shadows’ song and dance differently this time? In these subtle changes in perception there lies a wealth of things to investigate, to peer into, to be afraid of, to be excited by… That said, our writing process doesn’t involve too much premeditated verbal back and forth. We tend to start lobbing sessions at each other and a path inevitably clears. In this case, and in no small part, the clearing of the path of That Porous Line begins with the contributions of my longtime sonic comrade David Daniell. The two pieces Oliver and I made with David are the earliest in the sessions that would become this record. He brought, for lack of a better word, a beauty - a gentle, organic beauty - that ultimately reoriented PFN toward a sense of the melodic and of spontaneity. We moved away from programming sequences, generative patches, and atomizing every sound source via heavy processing. We lightened the gloom a bit. It might sound naive, but we touched instruments again; we played guitars and basses and keyboards and percussion, fingers on metal wire and wood. We reveled in less-than-perfect real time performance, and documented it as such. There is a certain lightness to that. Don’t get me wrong, That Porous Line is absolutely a collaged, flickering, chaotic, electro-acoustic record. The project is the project after all. Although our tomb-room isn’t fully hermetic (what is?), I think it is a place PFN will always reside. A total escape outside into harshly lit reality without mystery is fairly unappealing, for us anyway. Inside is personal, guarded from too much light; a dark terrarium of weird ghosts and peculiar shadows ripe for conjuring and harnessing in order to make them kick and howl in a way pleasing to us. Or at least be near enough to them to try and hear what they sing. That’s the motive. We decorate the cave, invite the specters to reveal a message, and try to capture something. Inside, cocooned in the semi-dark of our uncommon space, we bang our heads against the act of interpreting these shifty, chimeric, hidden sonic shadows. How big is it in here? How much further down can we go? Did something move in that corner over there? Can it touch us? Can we catch it? That’s where the fear is. That’s where the fun happens. That’s why we listen. That’s why we play."

Room 40's J.WLSN returns to Lawrence English's label flanked by his old mate Liam Keenan with a haze of guitars, synths and samples that evokes the rugged, beautiful landscape of New South Wales. Wilson and Keenan had been working together at an art museum in Sydney for some time when they finally decided to book a session at a local studio. It didn't take long either; working with their mutual friend David Akerman, they laid down a set of peaceful longform jams that appeared as they reminisced about different stretches of time in the area where they both grew up. Finding the shared similarities and differences, the music appeared as a soundtrack. On the four-part 'Teflon Blues', their hazy recollections buried beneath a fog of blurry instrumentation, while on the generous centerpiece 'The Power of Emptiness' they're obscured by gusts of white noise that seem to erode the duo's humming guitar tones. The album concludes with the three act 'Suburban Dopamine', a tape loop symphony that builds so slowly you don't even notice it coming. Eventually, the muggy, ferric guitars are interrupted by crystal clear plucks that roll across the duo's sonic landscape like tumbleweed.

“Ruins are the style of our future cities, future cities are themselves ruins.” - Izosaki Arata A Note From Lawrence English Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future. The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures. In recent times, I’ve proposed a term for this weaponised use of nostalgia, something I have called Acid Nostalgia. I offer it as a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times. It is, in part, a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail. Acid Nostalgia describes an increasingly common political projection of nostalgia that exists without any subjective connection to the memory surrounding and contained within it. Like acid poured onto a surface, this use of nostalgia seeks to erodes and smooth out the complexity and texture of lived connection and longing, which has until recently guided contemplations of nostalgia. Acid Nostalgia instead erases the texture of histories and de-contours the past, and in doing so dematerialises the horizon of possibility, which by its very nature marks the beginning point for any (and all) imaginable futures. Acid Nostalgia is a dreamless screen, where uncertainty, restlessness and aspiration are subjected to corrosion, breaking down and neutralising the wellspring of futures which are birthed from within the ambiguously charged, complex and at times chaotic atmospheres of the present. The Rest Is My Ghost is not however some universal reading of these things and happenings. Rather it draws its breath from a very personal pathway carved through my own fraught experiences of nostalgia and framed through a disparate collage of chance encounters, situations, places and provocations. It takes oblique notes from civic and architectural references such as Japan’s Metabolist movement, Hong Kong’s ‘one line sky’ and Los Angeles’s vanished Sodium Vapour lights. It interpolates texts – factual and fictional – by authors such as Franco Berardi, Kate Crawford, JG Ballard, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mark Fisher and Alexei Yurchak who have each so wonderfully sought to rupture the familiarity of now, and push us towards other ways of imaging ourselves, our surroundings and our very ways of being in this world. I also owe a debt of thanks to Adam Curtis in helping launch what has become this edition. It was his provocation, in a conversation we shared about an overwhelming and profound sense of uncertainty around being able to predict the immediate future and how to respond to that, which sparked the earliest inklings of this edition. The Rest Is My Ghost is ultimately a record about the promise of constructions and connections to come, material, social and political. It's a record that accepts the fragility of failure as a source of ultimate potential, and a position from which the deepest freedom of imagination might be sought and summoned forth to conjure even the most unimaginable, (but) possible futures.

“Ruins are the style of our future cities, future cities are themselves ruins.” - Izosaki Arata A Note From Lawrence English Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future. The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures. In recent times, I’ve proposed a term for this weaponised use of nostalgia, something I have called Acid Nostalgia. I offer it as a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times. It is, in part, a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail. Acid Nostalgia describes an increasingly common political projection of nostalgia that exists without any subjective connection to the memory surrounding and contained within it. Like acid poured onto a surface, this use of nostalgia seeks to erodes and smooth out the complexity and texture of lived connection and longing, which has until recently guided contemplations of nostalgia. Acid Nostalgia instead erases the texture of histories and de-contours the past, and in doing so dematerialises the horizon of possibility, which by its very nature marks the beginning point for any (and all) imaginable futures. Acid Nostalgia is a dreamless screen, where uncertainty, restlessness and aspiration are subjected to corrosion, breaking down and neutralising the wellspring of futures which are birthed from within the ambiguously charged, complex and at times chaotic atmospheres of the present. The Rest Is My Ghost is not however some universal reading of these things and happenings. Rather it draws its breath from a very personal pathway carved through my own fraught experiences of nostalgia and framed through a disparate collage of chance encounters, situations, places and provocations. It takes oblique notes from civic and architectural references such as Japan’s Metabolist movement, Hong Kong’s ‘one line sky’ and Los Angeles’s vanished Sodium Vapour lights. It interpolates texts – factual and fictional – by authors such as Franco Berardi, Kate Crawford, JG Ballard, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mark Fisher and Alexei Yurchak who have each so wonderfully sought to rupture the familiarity of now, and push us towards other ways of imaging ourselves, our surroundings and our very ways of being in this world. I also owe a debt of thanks to Adam Curtis in helping launch what has become this edition. It was his provocation, in a conversation we shared about an overwhelming and profound sense of uncertainty around being able to predict the immediate future and how to respond to that, which sparked the earliest inklings of this edition. The Rest Is My Ghost is ultimately a record about the promise of constructions and connections to come, material, social and political. It's a record that accepts the fragility of failure as a source of ultimate potential, and a position from which the deepest freedom of imagination might be sought and summoned forth to conjure even the most unimaginable, (but) possible futures.

Somewhere in the Wind is the third record that Loren Connors and I have made together. Of the three, it’s the first that consists exclusively of electric guitar duos and it’s the first that was recorded live. To me it feels very much like a live record; this music happened in crowded rooms in Brooklyn on two dates in 2025 and there’s an urgency to connect with others and a pleasure in doing so that can be heard on both of these tracks. On the first of our duo records (Arborvitae, 2003) I primarily play piano, and on the second (Evening Air, 2024) we switch off on piano and guitar. Both of those albums bespeak the privacy of the recording studio, where time is suspended and one can explore the quietest of sounds. By contrast, Somewhere in the Wind is the noisiest, most raucous and most free of our duo records. It’s the sound of us taking it to the stage. I became a fan of Loren’s playing from the moment that I first heard it, after happening upon a beat-up copy of In Pittsburgh circa 1992 in a used bin in the Dr. Wax record store in Chicago where my then-bandmate Bundy K. Brown worked. Everyone has taken a chance on a record because it looked interesting and wouldn’t set you back too much. In that regard In Pittsburgh was the find of a lifetime. I had just switched from playing in a postpunk power trio (Bastro) to making mostly drummerless respect-your-neighbors music (Gastr del Sol), and Loren’s pacing and touch and his lovely, unaffected compositions had me from the first listen. Not long after that, Jim O’Rourke and I reissued In Pittsburgh on our Dexter’s Cigar label, and I fondly remember first meeting Loren in New York’s Grand Central Station—so glamorous for this country mouse—and taking the train upstate with him where he shared a bill with Gastr del Sol. During soundcheck, Jim, Loren, and I played together for a bit and Loren’s approach to the instrument was something that one could instantly sink into, the kind of situation where there are no mistakes. I still feel that when we play together.

*Warehouse find!* In Italy, the genre of documentary film has represented a particularly fertile field for a critical review of the musical contribution to cinema at least since as early as the 1950s. The Italian public television RAI used to broadcast disturbing paranoiac dramas, weird documentaries on the bottom of the sea and indigestible so-called “educational” movies. ESP was a television series produced by Rai in 1973, directed by Daniele D'Anza, and aired from Sunday, May 27 1973 to Sunday, June 17, 1973 on the National Program. It was centered around Extra Sensory perception and paranormal psychic phenomena, and the music was made our beloved Maestro and personal hero Egisto Macchi. Compositions are often spooky and tense, with dark instrumentation and a wonderful ear for an odd tuning or unusual phrasing. There is no doubt that Macchi’s musical contribution is one of the most significant in the panorama of Italian documentary production, in both qualitative and quantita- tive terms. It would nevertheless be arduous to trace a complete picture of his activity in this field, for this would involve discussing several films which no longer exist and, according to records drawn up by Macchi himself, the number of his documentary film scores is well over a thousand. Egisto Macchi, often remembered as a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, the historic Italian improvising collective (that also included Franco Evangelisti and Ennio Morricone, among others), was a major figure within the contemporary music field from the fifties to the eighties. The life path of Egisto Macchi seemed to be devoted to the multiplicity of aesthetic choices and musical expressions. While tracing his life and work, one notices an interesting duality based both on a very inclusive approach towards all kind of expressive needs and full control of the level of communication.

Ignatz, the long-running project of Belgian musician Bram Devens, has spent two decades refining a distinctive approach to songcraft—built on repetition, subtle shifts, and an ear for the uncanny. Across a steady stream of releases on labels including (K-RAA-K)³, Ultra Eczema and Fonal, his work remains instantly recognisable while continually evolving. I Don’t Know marks a striking departure. Following earlier recordings centred on guitar, Devens turns to piano, uncovering a new, more skeletal language. The instrument first entered his orbit in the mid-2010s, when he inherited a family piano and began exploring its possibilities as a self-taught player. Recorded at home in Landen, these pieces feel sparse and unsettled, carrying a raw intimacy that sets them apart from his previous work. The result is a haunted, deeply personal album that reframes Ignatz’s sound without losing its core identity.

A masterpiece by Masahiko Togashi, Masayuki Takayanagi, Motoki Takagi, and Motoharu Yoshizawa—some of the most important artists in the history of Japanese free jazz. Takayanagi’s guitar, which makes effective use of feedback techniques; Takagi’s dynamic tenor saxophone and corn pipe (a type of vertical flute); Yoshizawa’s string sounds, which are so free they seem almost effortless; and Togashi’s intelligent drumming, which combines precision with power—all come together to create a landmark album that truly heralds the dawn of a new era!

Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano is a record that is very close to my heart. In fact, it is Akira’s work that was one of the drivers for Someone Good, one of the Room40 sibling labels, to be founded. Polaroid Piano marks the beginning of what would later become known as felt piano music, an approach to the piano which was picked up by numerous artists across subsequent years. It captures an essential and intimate rendering of the piano at close proximity, but it does more than that, it allows the piano to breathe within the places around it. Structurally, the record is a collection of piano-led vignettes. Each piece is a microcosm of lived in music, which is porous, and opens themselves outward, inviting a sense of time and ’the present’ to seep into the music. They feel instantly intimate and evocative, melodies imprinted with the world around them. In some of the recordings a siren calls out from beyond the immediate acoustic space of the studio, whilst in others birds seep in and the rustling of Akira’s clothing folds into the music itself. When we first discussed the recording, Akira had invited me to offer some sounds that might act as a leaping off point for the compositions. I collected a series of field recordings which were offered as simple and suggestive prompts, and as a means of imagining ‘other’ environments which might be simultaneously in orbit of the places Akira was recording in. Some of those field recordings are captured in the record, like a memory being recounted at a distance of time. Polaroid Piano is a unique record for many reasons. One is it manages to manifest an acoustic transcription of that ‘momentary' quality of its photographic namesake. The pieces are auditory snapshots and reflect a certain quality of harmonic light and timbral exposure that is unquestionably tethered to the aesthetics of the polaroid format. It is a record that celebrates the body of the instrument as a sound source and invites us to be proximate to the resonation, and the living qualities of sound, that make music so utterly profound, and gratifying.

Folds of water sanctify the river. Tracing soft, cool hands, the tall oak make way for a child who is older now. The moon gives chase, as clouds attempt to climb her. And choiceless, she falls through, further out of sight. An episodic, dreamlike place; Headwater is an invitation to explore what is fundamental to life – as if asking the listener; what, after losing my compass, is the nature of my experience? The headwater is the childhood of the stream – its beginning. And as though banished from the safety, innocence and purity of this place, the individual is carried through rapids, gashed and sawn, calling for the self to be woven again. In these early moments, the poignancy of this venture is felt in droves – a woman lost in the forest trying to find a way out, silhouette skating through light while something approaches, further out of sight. Everyone is thrown out of childhood – hurled into a life to make sense of something which lives on in memory. The mind catches fragments, painted by ink found in the canals of the veins and rivers within – their headwater, the heart. Like tentacles beneath our skin, their message arrives unannounced, while a great struggle embarks to keep them at bay – the clarity of their awareness polluted. After a time, the river is older now. The forest’s foliage has tuned, sculpted and moulded her – so much so, that the water is barely recognisable. But the girl is no fool, and her sensitivity will not be auctioned. Catching glimpses of the headwater – she cries out to the forest and the valley. This time, unafraid of the pain it wears and hides behind, pretending. She sings to the eclipse, crying for the stars and their breath on the river’s back. Calling for the animals, insects and fish - bowing to the scent of the pine in the evening warmth of the air, weeping to the memory of her childhood, she comes alive. Only in such a surrender does the headwater of her tears make itself known, and all that is longed for arise without having ever been lost. Could she really be creating all of it? And like a child with a boundless imagination, be confusing her role in the play with the candid, honest face of life itself? Humility might yet speak – claiming all she has taken herself to be as the leaves and foliage which pollute and fragment the stream. That a quest to return to childhood is an unnecessary one – because the currents which begun at the headwater still contain, at every step of the river, the headwater itself. And that the cries and memories heard starkly through the forest valley have still come from the deepest waterways the body has pronounced. And so, originate in the heart – and are no threat.

A note from Cleared Our approach to making records has always involved an exchange of individually created sounds, which are joined together through live improvisation, studio recording, and the use of diagrammatic visual scores. Over the last several years, we have been interested in expanding very small fragments of these discreet pieces of audio into long-form compositions. This process has resulted in a new approach to how we build tracks from the ground up. In this particular workflow, one of us is largely responsible for supplying the main cache of sounds, and the other is responsible for the processing and sequencing of those sounds. As we developed this kind of working relationship, the nature of the material has ventured into a palette that is more electronic. This is perhaps a result of the "collage" aspect of how the audio is arranged inside of a digital environment, as well as our continued discovery and use of new digital processing tools. We are constantly attempting to extract as much as possible out of an initial collection of audio, which typically includes field recordings, synthesis experiments, bits of acoustic instrumentation, and found sounds. In many instances the original sounds are manipulated far beyond their recognizable characteristics, which creates new and unexpected results. We also share a great personal interest in utilizing sounds with different levels of fidelity, as we both enjoy the unique traits inherent in various recording formats. The artifacts and destructive compression of antiquated digital recorders, and the pristine qualities of modern studio technology both contain, in different ways, our own intimate relationships to such devices and spaces. We believe this is reflective of how we associate and remember sound, which is through the peripherals of its delivery. In the context of Cleared, this interest is pursued to further the poetic and gestural features of our music, and to create records that are infused with visual imagery, memory, and the physical environments in which we find inspiration. Lustres is the most detailed and refined output of our studio practice using this method of exchanging sound material. The four tracks present a mood that, for us, is indicative of a kind of rolling celestial atmosphere. Simultaneously, there exists both a subterranean and starlit quality about the music. To us, it is not unlike the imagined terrain of a distant meteor or orbiting asteroid, alternating between the extremes of light and temperature as its path is slowly carved in a dark vacuum. It is music for contemplation and quiet reflection, as these are the states of listening we have come to greatly appreciate in our personal lives, and as the space in which we are most happy to have our music experienced. Lustres is a document being released as we near 15 years of the Cleared collaboration, and we hope it offers listeners a chapter of our story that, while rooted in our past material, advances the core discipline of what we have always pursued as our central theme: Patience.

It has taken me over 50 years to write these words. Since my initial successes in the 1970’s many have urged me to “release” unpublished works from the same period, pieces that featured the VCS3 synths or the amazing Serge (which I regret not having used enough) or pieces featuring soundscapes from my classic environmental composition style. For reasons of persistence and empathy, Lawrence English at Room 40 was the most persuasive; now, nearly 3 years after our agreement, a new publication composed with materials from that inceptive period has come to fruition. While I’m condemned to live evermore in the past, it is the future where I continue to put my remaining creative energies. Nonetheless, in the creation of these 2 “new” works I did all I could to avoid sentimentalism or get buried by my own history and the musical riches of the late 20th Century. Relistening to these forgotten fragments of old tapes included inspiring and useful surprises.

“Elemental View” is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The expansive installation inhabits an industrial sized space with 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is a music at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral; immersing the listener in a transportive glistening atmosphere. “Elemental View” invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself. Fullman bows the instrument lengthwise with her fingertips while walking, playing multiple strings at once. As she walks, upper partial tones unfold at different rates, in proportion to differences in string length, imparting an undulating wave of continually shifting overtones. The notation for the Long String Instrument contains both temporal indications and spatial choreography, as specific harmonies emerge at distinct locations along the string length. Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman’s work. To produce percussive sounds on the otherwise drone-based instrument, Fullman designed and fabricated the box bow, shovelette, and shoveler, which play three, six, or nine strings at once. Varying techniques with these tools produce either open ringing tones or closed dampened ones. With their laser focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman’s composition. In the movements “Environmental Memory” and “Concentrated Merry-Go-Round”, Fullman incorporates Travis Andrew’s primary instrument, the guitar. Andy Meyerson and Fullman accompany the guitar in duo playing box bow and shoveler. For “Surface Narrative in Four Parts”, Meyerson also applies his percussion mastery to the santur, a Persian hammered dulcimer. The santur’s unique tuning is derived from the extended microtonal partials of the sequence played by Fullman on The Long String Instrument.