NEW ARRIVALS

„Öd“ marks the long-awaited return of Institut für Feinmotorik - the Black Forest collective known for using eight prepared turntables to investigate acoustic micro-phenomena generated by everyday objects - with a new album and their first full-length release on Faitiche. It is also the return of their almost comical understatement as personal artistic principle: „making almost nothing out of almost nothing,“ compressed into the dots on an umlaut. The Öd-nis, the wasteland, is a field that the collective has been ploughing in sound since their first release in 1997. Eight prepared turntables, four mixers, no records, six hands (give or take) merge into what they call the „Octogrammoticum“. A rotating organism of surfaces in friction, fed with the clutter from a drawer: rubber bands or tin foil, CDs, a discarded socket board. Under IFF's scrutinizing stylus, mundane almost-nothings get scratched open to reveal the acoustic density of negative space itself. Last year’s „Adhesive Tape“ drew IFF closer together after an almost ten-year hiatus. An eponymous event series at Berlin's silent green set in motion what would become their most twistedly funky release since „Penetrans“ on Staubgold in 2002. The only thing öd about „Öd" (meaning „barren" or „boring“ in German) may well be its title: layers of improvised play and randomized loops convolve around porous, dubby groove locks, tugging at each other in a call-and-response with howling static that cuts through bulbous ambient techno into a scrap-metal Dixieland phantasm. Stratified yet spacious, these sonic double exposures always hover on the verge of collapsing. What you think you hear might not be what you actually hear. The album’s track titles resemble Conceptual Poetry, extending this psycho-phenomenological gesture into the realm of spoken language. Conceived by renowned poet Dagmara Kraus, they become word molecules - „stern,” „dies,” „lose“ - tilting delicately between German and English, constantly changing depending on the ear’s perspective and pointing back to the deeply unstable fabric connecting meaning and sound. Which also makes „Öd“ an unusual cross-disciplinary collaboration - at least in the field of electronic music. PS: Since its beginnings in Bad Säckingen, IFF has always been more than the sum of its rotating parts, moving tirelessly between multimedia art, theory, solo projects and collaborations. With IFF Expanded, the collective now opens its eight-doored apparatus, inviting artists working with CDJs or samplers to join - an ambitious live format that loosens its former purity law while carrying forward a long-standing curatorial practice. The same thread also runs into the related event series Acephalic Headspace. (Text: Sonja Matuszczyk)

Markus Guentner’s 2001 debut In Moll emerged from the early years of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series and has since become a cult favourite of 21st-century ambient music. Across its patient, spacious compositions, delicate melodic fragments, soft synth washes, distant bells and deep bass tones create an enveloping, dreamlike sound. Warm yet melancholy, In Moll helped establish Guentner as a distinctive voice in electronic music, earning admirers including Kompakt founders Michael Mayer and Wolfgang Voigt. This 25th anniversary edition also includes a reworked interpretation of the album by Guentner himself.

Klara Lewis' Opening is a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers. "Klara Lewis’ distinctive talent for disfiguring sound into forms that remain recognisably song-like reaches a new peak here. Lewis, creator of worlds, treats music as a mirror that reflects a perspective misaligned with the real image. Her music moves in unusual and often startling ways. Acoustic instruments such as ukulele and piano are subjected to processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, their original forms continually reshaped. The tracks within Opening offer an array of disorientating tactics; damaged field recordings are suddenly sliced into ominous rhythmical patterns whilst deceptively simple tactics provide foreboding dread. Often alien on entry, the progression of a piece can land in a surprising tenderness, or the other way around. The momentum grows as a physical state but also one which is questioning, desiring, encapsulating a feeling, to explore a further way of expression and ultimately connecting: A new closeness, a new perspective. Opening is an album in which the protagonist’s manipulation of sonic matter seems to extend beyond the music itself, resulting in a corresponding manipulation of the active listener. Sounds shift, dissolve, and re-emerge in altered forms, creating an experience that feels both intimate and disorienting. Lewis maintains a delicate balance between abstraction and emotional immediacy, drawing the listener into a world where familiar musical gestures are constantly reconfigured in surprising ways. The works on Opening are refracted through an exploratory and transformative lens, suggesting an artist continuing to redefine the possibilities of musical language as a space where the instantaneous and the eternal come together."

Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer Grand River (Aimée Portioli) presents Temporary, an album written in the aftermath of personal grief and loss. Released through Editions Mego, it combines resonant guitar, modular synthesis, deep low-end electronics, acoustic passages and heavy percussion, moving between brooding intensity and spacious ambience. Tracks such as 'The crossing of the body, the crossing of the mind' and 'Maybe I am dead and this is paradise' bring guitars into dramatic collision with electronics, while gentler passages introduce harp and acoustic guitar. Its interconnected titles form a meditation on mortality, transience and the heightened value of fleeting experience.

Spring Back, Ball Forward is the Soda Gong debut from Jung dj, nom de plume of shapeshifting multi-instrumentalist Randy Riback. Following a series of uniformly great self-releases and cassettes on the dearly missed Lillerne Tapes, this collection observes the spacious and angular dynamics of 1990s Midwestern post-rock through the lens of the bedroom electronic music producer. Perhaps surprisingly, amp worship lies at the center of the album: a fascination with the grain, pressure, and emotional charge of amplification and gain, refracted through the strange remove of digital amp modeling. Tubes, speakers, sag, and in-the-red textures are a critical part of the album’s expressive vocabulary, imparting density and colorful saturation while lending even its most weightless passages a vital sense of physical presence. Over the course of twelve tracks, wistful ambience gives way to blunt heaviness and roiling catharsis, underpinned by a palpable sense of loss and grief. The album’s auspicious cast of collaborators further complicates its emotional terrain. Spoken contributions from Natalia Panzer and Angelina Nonaj occupy strikingly different registers: Panzer’s diffuse and oblique, drifting in and out of the music’s contours; Nonaj’s a vivid travelogue, grounding the record in place and lived experience. Elsewhere, Soda Gong veteran Mister Water Wet joins a small constellation of guests whose playing folds naturally into Riback’s arrangements, blurring the boundaries between computer and ensemble music. For all of its attention to texture, process, and the material qualities of sound, Spring Back, Ball Forward is first and foremost an emotionally potent work, possessed of a directness that can feel rare within experimental electronic music. Riback draws from a rich and idiosyncratic musical vernacular, arriving at something deeply felt and difficult to place: a singular statement whose pathos exceeds the sum of its references.

*200 copies limited edition* The music on ‘Remanens’ is the result of a commission by Art Cinema OFF off and B.A.A.D.M to score the short silent film ‘Positano’ made by french actor and filmmaker Pierre Clémenti in 1969. The film itself is an ever-shifting series of glimpses, without much context, of a family vacation to the island Positano. The short cuts are similar to a dream or obscured, residual memories where chronology has fallen apart. The score was reworked into album format on ‘Remanens’, the title being the Swedish word for remanence. The word has several meanings, most commonly residual magnetism left behind in a material. It is consequently used when referring to residue on magnetic tape, as well as data remanence, which is the residual digital data that remains even after attempts have been made to erase a hard drive. The music was reworked with remnant traces of memory in mind, of the film, but also of how glimpses of memories from another life, when the future was undecided, can make a person feel – and how it can unveil one’s own traces of what the future felt like. Linus Hillborg (b. 1989) is a Swedish composer, musician and multidisciplinary artist based in Stockholm. His diverse creative practice spans experimental music across both electronic and acoustic realms, as well as compositions for film, theatre, and interactive installations. In 2021 he released his acclaimed solo-debut 'Magelungsverket' through Moloton, derived from the installation 'Orphan Works' which he built with an obsolete computer game engine. In 2023 he released 'Four Works' through Kali Malone and Maria W Horn’s label XKatedral, which featured a series of instrumental works by himself and Theodor Kentros.

Otto A Totland's modern compositional elements are most widely recognized as half of the Norwegian duo Deaf Center, where his melancholic, intricate piano work provides haunting relief to the beds of noise and deep strings from Erik K Skodvin. Pinô is the first full-length release by Totland, though his solo work has been released once, as the 5-minute A-side of Sonic Pieces 7inch Harmony From the Past. Otto's previously brief vignettes are now expanded into a fully personal realization of his own style. Initial track Open fills itself with heavy, knowing pauses that quickly become overwhelmed with the desire to understand what's to come. Each silence leads into quick flutters of keys, preparing the listener for a vast terrain of giddy beauty, bleak depths, and true contentedness. Pinô quickly recalls deep winter; in front of a fireplace for days on end, you lose how far along you've ventured into the 18 tracks without any idea how far is left to go. The experience feels inevitable, with no other option but to curl up somewhere cozy and appreciate the sense of timelessness that Totland has created. His album is a haunting modern compositional treasure, expressed through instrumentals completely unique to Totland and captured masterfully by Nils Frahm at Durton Studios. With Pinô, Otto A Totland appears out of the Norwegian landscape, sharing an achievement that will provide a relief during the brooding winter darkness. Though a highly personal endeavor, the recognizable continuation of Totland’s compositions will attract fans of Deaf Center, and the cinematic and classical components of his solo work will hold sway for those familiar with Harold Budd or Dustin O’Halloran.

"Take me, I’m yours" is the first collaboration album between Alan Abrahams and Jan Jelinek. Released through the latter’s faitiche, it builds upon multi-layered vocal sketches by the former. The Paris-based artist, primarily known for his work as Portable and Bodycode, supplied Jelinek with multi-layered song sketches that the German artist subjected to a rigorous process of manipulation, excavating the ambiguities of the original material and transforming its rhythms into subtle pulses. "Take me, I’m yours" is neither a typical Abrahams record nor a classic Jelinek album—it is something third, mediating between the physicality of the voice and the abstraction of electronic sound design. The two had crossed paths before really getting to know each other after Abrahams invited Jelinek to play at one of his Süd Electronic parties. The idea of a collaboration emerged slowly. “It started as an experiment, and over the past few years grew from a few tracks into this album,” says Abrahams. He describes recording the basic material as a “tantalizing” process, not knowing how Jelinek would transform his material, some of which was based on wordless chanting, while other tracks were working with lyrical content. However, their mutual trust allowed Jelinek to remove the harmonies, radically reduce the rhythms, and concentrate on Abrahams’ voice. Jelinek heard something “fragile” in this voice, “moments of doubt and dark premonitions.” He points to Forever as an example. “Alan’s original song reminded me of classic vocal house, but his voice seemed to almost break,” he says. “This contradiction made the piece even bigger, because we hear a singer in the moment of an awakening.” He further accentuated such tensions through arrhythmic synth modulations and time-stretching algorithms, while also adding concrete sounds from a variety of sources. With its dedication to both transforming and amplifying the emotional qualities hidden within Abrahams’ pieces, "Take me, I’m yours" functions as a dialogue between those two singular artists.

Following up on 2024's Acid Trax double album on Comatose, acid house music is back with Acid Devil, a 2x12" and digital self-published release. Created strictly with an 808 and modified 303, it's a more extreme range, but following the classic format of the acid sound, pioneered in Chicago. The 2x12" is limited to 200 copies and available as reservation only, with the final shipping date TBA, around summer 2026. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung.

Part 2 of the jungle series, it's another 4-tracker for fuzzy Akai hardware samplers, Technics turntable, analog monosynth bass and wide stretches of polysynths. Built with strictly old-school hardware with a loose groove, it's somewhere to get lost, down those night roads, and early mornings in the sky. Soak it up, and let's let time move a little faster.

Arriving at the third edition of the jungle series, we're relying yet once again on oldschool techniques, limited memory, and an absolute defiance of progression, unless we consider consistent values of anarchy a benchmark. A testament to tenement tagging, with bulletin synth lines, rubberized basslines, and an ever-changing palette of drum breaks, here we arrive at a place where we once were, and never were. Limited edition 12", mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Edition of 200 copies.

1972 masterpiece by Phyllis Dillon, one of the most iconic Rocksteady singers. A total　12 tunes sung neatly in a rocksteady manner with sweet melodies and slow rhythms.

1974's "Natty Locks Dub" is well sought-after by reggae afficionados and viny collectors alike. Producer Winston Edwards left Jamaica to reside in the UK in 1974 and through his strong connections with reggae luminaries such as Joe Gibbs, Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby began to travel back and forth between London and Kingston (JA) to bring back recordings to issue on his Fay Music label in the UK. In 1974 he issued his first dub album, the heavy hitting Natty Locks Dub featuring rhythms built at Lee Perry’s Black Ark and Joe Gibbs' new studio with overdubs done in the UK. These early dub tracks have a mystical atmosphere all of their own, cool, jazzy, melodic, with a great sound.

Asthmatic Kitty Records will release 'Worst Christmas Ever!,' a single-LP collection that distills Sufjan Stevens' expansive holiday catalog—drawn from the box sets 'Songs for Christmas' and 'Silver & Gold'—into one definitive collection. The album pairs fifteen favorites, selected from more than one hundred Christmas recordings, with the newly released original song "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)," Sufjan's first new Christmas song in nearly fifteen years.

Asthmatic Kitty Records will release 'Worst Christmas Ever!,' a single-LP collection that distills Sufjan Stevens' expansive holiday catalog—drawn from the box sets 'Songs for Christmas' and 'Silver & Gold'—into one definitive collection. The album pairs fifteen favorites, selected from more than one hundred Christmas recordings, with the newly released original song "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)," Sufjan's first new Christmas song in nearly fifteen years.

When a British alt-soul and art-pop duo collaborates with Filipino musical royalty, the result is a blinding flash of artistic spirit that transcends geographical and generational barriers. For Margate-based act Thandii, a chaotic whirlwind of a trip to Manila allowed Graham Godfrey and Jess Berry to explore a new cultural context of song-writing. After several prolific years of self-released albums together, they took the opportunity to channel Graham’s Filipino heritage through an ambitious and somewhat zany project proposed by the label Sama Sama Records: for Thandii to make their next album with the most recorded drummer in the Philippines, Jun Regalado. Now in his late 70s, Jun Regalado has recently gained more recognition internationally after the reissue of his track ‘Pinoy Funk’ (from the Soundway compilation Ayo Ke Disco in 2024), along with the discovery of nearly 500 album appearances that are now finding themselves in the collections of younger generations. And on Coco Okayo - the first time he has collaborated outside of his contemporaries - Regalado effectively passes the torch. Not only does Thandii take inspiration from the 70s ‘Manila Sound’ movement, the sound of Manila itself is inescapably embedded in the album via the local recording studio. It was “like stepping into a time-warp”, the duo say. “Period correct pre-amps, compressors and instruments recreated the tones of the era, and combined with Sir Jun’s magical sound and touch – it created an authenticity so completely right for the moment.” In exploring a sound born of the diaspora with roots in British soul music, Coco Okayo makes full use of the polymath abilities of both Jess and Graham. While they provide vocals, percussion, flutes and production, they still manage to carve out space for regular Margate collaborators (including keyboardist Steve Pringle, Graham’s bandmate in Pigeon), as well as tapping Filipino connections in the United States such as Wyn Avillas and Ian Santillano. “I felt like the melodies and flurries of flute poured out of me during this whole process - it was quite freeing and explorative and unlike any album we’d made previously”, says Jess. The resulting album dances around genres and influences, from OPM to soul, disco-funk and trip-hop, refusing to be categorised as any one thing and yet cohesive in its sound. Thandii likes to dub it MAR-NILA. “It’s a new genre coming from Filipino diaspora artists paying tribute to the Manila sound of the 70s,” say Thandii, “but combining it with modern day post-punk-disco, beat-driven-art-pop music coming from the small seaside town of Margate”. Whichever way the listener might interpret it, it’s clear that Coco Okayo is not stuck between worlds, but rather, has built a utopian world of its own.

Occam Ocean is a series of acoustic compositions made for and with individual instrumentalists by the late French composer Éliane Radigue. Extending the interactive process pioneered in Naldjorlak (2005–2009), Occam Ocean employs a scoreless method of composing in dialogue with each performer. Dating back to 2011, the series has proliferated almost organically, growing out of a musical and social dynamic of combinatoriality and multiplication to a catalog of more than eighty discrete compositions. This body of work stands as one of the most extraordinary late-career outpourings in recent music history. The Occam series was catalyzed in part by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Radigue encountered a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio signals to gamma rays—which impressed upon her the minuscule range of human hearing relative to the seemingly unlimited compass of universal wavelength and frequency. The Occam compositions seem to address this vertiginous confrontation with the infinite; each individual composition elaborates a radically reduced technique or sound process, frequently working outward from only a handful of fundamental tones, to expose the flickering, idiosyncratic spectral behavior of the instrument. The reference to William of Ockham indicates a principled commitment to parsimony; paradoxically, the reduction in material content makes possible an incommensurate richness in perceived acoustical detail. Notable in the Occam series is the inextricable identification of the composition with the performer for whom, and with whom, it was made. The particular sounds and techniques of each individual performer are thus indelibly stamped in the composition; the piece composes the playing of that musician, as much as the musician plays the composition. The time-honored division of labor between performer and composer is thus suspended and reconfigured, proposing a model for new music composition that has not yet been fully theorized or understood. Occam XIII, Occam River XI (presented here in two distinct readings, which reveal subtle variations in instrumental response), and Occam V feature two longtime collaborators of Radigue in solo and duo formations. Charles Curtis, the first instrumentalist for whom Radigue wrote an acoustic composition (Naldjorlak), performs on cello, while Dafne Vicente-Sandoval—whose parallel investigations into her instrument’s complex sounding properties led her to collaborate with Radigue—performs on bassoon. The works were recorded at Temple Saint-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, during a 2024 residency at La Becque, a setting previously explored by the musicians for its distinctive acoustic properties.

Occam Ocean is a series of acoustic compositions made for and with individual instrumentalists by the late French composer Éliane Radigue. Extending the interactive process pioneered in Naldjorlak (2005–2009), Occam Ocean employs a scoreless method of composing in dialogue with each performer. Dating back to 2011, the series has proliferated almost organically, growing out of a musical and social dynamic of combinatoriality and multiplication to a catalog of more than eighty discrete compositions. This body of work stands as one of the most extraordinary late-career outpourings in recent music history. The Occam series was catalyzed in part by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Radigue encountered a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio signals to gamma rays—which impressed upon her the minuscule range of human hearing relative to the seemingly unlimited compass of universal wavelength and frequency. The Occam compositions seem to address this vertiginous confrontation with the infinite; each individual composition elaborates a radically reduced technique or sound process, frequently working outward from only a handful of fundamental tones, to expose the flickering, idiosyncratic spectral behavior of the instrument. The reference to William of Ockham indicates a principled commitment to parsimony; paradoxically, the reduction in material content makes possible an incommensurate richness in perceived acoustical detail. Notable in the Occam series is the inextricable identification of the composition with the performer for whom, and with whom, it was made. The particular sounds and techniques of each individual performer are thus indelibly stamped in the composition; the piece composes the playing of that musician, as much as the musician plays the composition. The time-honored division of labor between performer and composer is thus suspended and reconfigured, proposing a model for new music composition that has not yet been fully theorized or understood. Occam XIII, Occam River XI (presented here in two distinct readings, which reveal subtle variations in instrumental response), and Occam V feature two longtime collaborators of Radigue in solo and duo formations. Charles Curtis, the first instrumentalist for whom Radigue wrote an acoustic composition (Naldjorlak), performs on cello, while Dafne Vicente-Sandoval—whose parallel investigations into her instrument’s complex sounding properties led her to collaborate with Radigue—performs on bassoon. The works were recorded at Temple Saint-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, during a 2024 residency at La Becque, a setting previously explored by the musicians for its distinctive acoustic properties.

From deep in the hard funk pocket, the Winston Brothers return to Colemine after four years with a second helping of sounds rooted in horn-heavy, 70s-style soul cinema, taking cues from the soundtrack work of Issac Hayes, Willie Hutch, Roy Ayers, and JJ Johnson. Helmed by multi-instrumentalist/producer Sebastian Nagel and longtime collaborator Lucas Kochbeck on drums, Sweets serves as a timely reminder of how Hamburg, Germany’s music scene helps shape and influence today’s soul sound.Ultimately, bringing musicians like Kimo Eiserbeck (sax and flute) and Hans Stephan (trumpet), alongside some additional drum contributions by Max Whitefield (née Weissenfeldt), demonstrates the close-knit nature of these musicians. From influential bands like Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band to Angels of Libra and the Mighty Mocambos, Hamburg’s deep groove scene has sired its share of worthy soul and funk acolytes. These musicians have shared stages and studios over the years, with various configurations finding their way in the aforementioned bands.“We started as a school project… we were just kids,” Sebastian recalls. “It’s a family thing, and we really know each other well.”Sweets is more than just another addition to this scene’s collective musical canon; it is a vibrant dispatch from funk’s leading edge.

Echoes of Impermanence sees David Granström’s previously established strict hermetic minimalist musical topography undergo a major shift with the introduction of the electric guitar, which instigates a breaking of the sealed crystal walls of the composer’s previous work within music of long duration and precise digital synthesis, bringing forth a riff-laden spirit previously lingering below the surface. The album was recorded at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion EMS as well as in the composer’s own studio with the help of Mats Erlandsson and features a guest appearance by long-time collaborator and XKatedral co-founder Maria W Horn performing on the Hurdy-Gurdy on the title track. David Granström is a composer and musician from Umeå in the northern part of Sweden. His hometown is a stronghold of extreme musical expression and consequently Granström grew up playing guitar in a metal band and started to compose music within that context which eventually evolved into solo projects, having access to studio facilities adjacent to the rehearsal space. Granström initially found his personal musical voice within the context of electroacoustic composition utilizing his advanced programming ability to manifest a sound and formal structure governed by algorithmic processes. The resulting musical work is characterized by harmonic simplicity and spatiotextural complexity, employing sounds of synthetic and acoustic origin in combination with strict digital synthesis techniques.

Amina Hocine and Espen Sommer Eide contribute two extended compositions created for the GRM acousmonium. Hocine’s ‘X3’ combines sine waves, field recordings and her self-built foghorn organ in a slowly evolving piece inspired by Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen. Eide’s ‘Until The Fish Eyes Shine’ draws on his work as Phonophani, bringing elements of late-1990s Tromsø ambient techno into an experimental electronic setting. Both pieces explore the relationship between sound, space and time, moving from delicate electronic details to expansive, otherworldly passages. Artwork by Stephen O’Malley.

electronic music. Jules Négrier's An Iris Crackled Like Eyelids unfolds in two movements, moving from raw emotion and shifting harmonics into tangled rhythms and strange electronic sounds. Maria W Horn's All Solids Melt Into Aether pits computer-generated tones against an organ pushed to its limits, creating a compelling struggle between precision and instability. Both works find beauty in tension, with sounds constantly changing, collapsing and finding unexpected forms. Artwork comes courtesy of Stephen O'Malley.

Private Mexican lounge that still burns long after the cruise ship disembarks. Armed with a single nylon string guitar, a toy chest of rudimentary percussion, and the emotional microtones of the Spanish tongue, Alejandro Bravo's lone LP blends bossanova, samba, and the Brill Building into a horny margarita for the tourist class. Recorded at home in Acapulco in 1971, Bravo's self-released LP slaps and thrills with its taps and trills. Pair with a pregnancy test for best results.

Mike Ladd never stopped making music; over the years he's popped up on all sorts of unexpected collaborations, soundtracked a Netflix series, and worked with visual artists in settings like the Pantheon in Paris. Still, Ladd's last solo album was more than ten years ago, and his magnum opus Welcome to the Afterfuture dropped in early 2000. Nonechosen is a granite testament to the fact that the artist has evolved and grown, but maintains the same gravitas that made his name what it is. Nonechosen is a solo album, but Ladd worked with old friends: No Surrender and Tom Degeeter collaborated on respective tracks. Once Mike got the record 95% there with his own production, he passed it on to Preservation, who, with a few well-placed tweaks, elevated the project to new heights. Backwoodz Studioz is honored to be part of Ladd's comet-like return, introducing this seminal artist to a new generation of hip-hop fans.